


Totally Awesome Automotive Diagnostic Tool

by rokhal



Series: The Legend of Hillrock Heights [6]
Category: Ghost Rider (Comics), The Incredible Hulk (Comics)
Genre: Amadeus Cho Can Do Anything, Artificial Intelligence, Car Accidents, Car Chases, Cars, Flying Cars, Food, Food Issues, Friendship, Gabe Reyes Is Digging Middle School, Gaslighting, Gen, Hacking, Hybrid Cars, INTERNAL SCREAMING, Internal Conflict, Killer Robots, Middle School, Minecraft, Murder, Robbie Reyes Would Settle For Not Becoming A Serial Killer, Sharing a Body, Teacher Leave Them Kids Alone, Work, Workplace, automotive repair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-26 17:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 76,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21378097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: Amadeus Cho comes to East Los Angeles to check up on the local hero/cryptid, Robbie Reyes, the Ghost Rider. Distracted by the fascinating world of automotive repair, Amadeus invents a revolutionary new diagnostic tool that teaches the cars how to diagnose and describe their own problems.This requires that the cars be self-aware.You know where this is going.(Though written as part of a series, this fic can be read as a stand-alone.)Check the art post by lalunaunita!
Series: The Legend of Hillrock Heights [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1176620
Comments: 14
Kudos: 22
Collections: Marvel Big Bang 2019





	1. Act I

**Author's Note:**

> For this bigbang, I was honored to be matched with lalunaunita (on Tumblr and AO3) who does BADASS art with traditional materials.  
She even helped with beta-ing because she is nice. Any mistakes are my own.
> 
> Also many thanks to mnemosyne2110 on Tumblr who very generously beta-ed some of my dialogue! Without their help, this fic would have 1. not enough Spanish, and 2. the Spanish there was would be wrong and/or really weird.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amadeus Cho here is from sometime during his Totally Awesome Hulk/Champions (2016) days, after the death of Bruce Banner but before Return to Planet Hulk. He's super strong, he's super smart, he's super rich. Also, he's super humble.
> 
> Robbie Reyes here is from Uber!verse, which picks up about where Ghost Rider (2016) leaves off and completely ignores everything in 616 right now where Robbie is on the Avengers. All you need to know about Uber!verse is, Robbie is an Uber driver, and his deal with Eli is a kill code.

_…While the contemporary news media and later popular mythology also repeated the “Jack The Ripper” legend, what is more likely is that several independent killers selected their victims from Fleet Street, simply as a matter of opportunity._

Robbie did his best to tune out the podcast. He had his headphones on, the client's oxygen sensor unscrewed, a pressure gauge sticking into the exhaust system where the sensor had been. He lay on his back on a creeper, the car inches from his nose. “Lenny!”

**He's probably OD'd again.**

_Shut up._ “Lenny, I need you to crank up this Outback!”

_ …Prostitution was rife on Fleet Street, attracting sexually-frustrated men as well as lost women to separate them from their money. It was only natural for violence to occur. But still, the legend of Jack The Ripper lives on, because the public is not ready to accept that the demon of Fleet Street was merely a handful of common killers._

**This is boring. Put on the one about Cletus Kassady. **

_You already listened to that one._

**So? Put it on.**

Robbie grabbed the car by the frame and scooted himself out from underneath. All the workbays at Canelo's Auto and Body were full, but Lenny was nowhere in sight. _You'll get bored and tell me to switch again. I downloaded this podcast for you. Shut up and listen._

He got into the Outback's driver's seat and started the engine idling, a few choked chugs. Robbie threw himself out the door and onto the ground, seized the pressure gauge that dangled from the bottom of the car and glanced at the reading just before the motor died. High, way into the red. Exhaust system restriction. Downstream of his pressure gauge were the catalytic converter and the muffler; Robbie was betting the blockage was in the cat.

**I'm bored, Robbie,** Eli said, injecting what should be a petulant statement with pure menace. **It's not healthy for us to sit around all day, work, work, work, play house with little Gabbie, work, work, work some more. We're built for action. We're not tame. And these yellow journalists at NPR are slandering my boy Jack.**

Robbie sat down on the creeper and dug out his phone.

_ **Thank ** _ **you.**

He put on a _Speed Demon_ album.

**Oh, fuck you, you little shit,** Eli snarled, and Robbie cranked the volume. Frantic drumming, distorted squeals, and then _FUCK THIS FUCK THIS ALL THIS CITY, ALL THIS CITY SOLD ITS SOUL, COME MIERDA POLICIA—_

**This is not music!**

Robbie pumped up the volume until his ears ached. He slid back under the car, unscrewed the pressure gauge from the oxygen sensor hole, hopped back into the driver's seat, and cranked the engine again. This time it ran without issue, albeit loudly, happily belching carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons through the hole. Problem localized. He shut down the motor before the exhaust gasses could catch anything on fire, and made his notes on the restriction. Headed for his locker to grab a dental mirror—actually, part of a yard-sale make-up compact epoxied to an old collapsible antenna—so he could peer into the catalytic converter without taking it all the way off.

He was just picking his way through the garage, head down, eyes flickering up and down and to the sides and back over his shoulder, when he saw Ramón Cordova out by the lobby, menacing a skinny Asian guy in a baggy T-shirt and swim trunks.

Ramón Cordova was six-one, almost two hundred pounds, scarred up and covered in tattoos. He was locally famous for single-handedly massacring an entire clíqua back in the early Oughts. Supposedly he'd turned a new leaf in prison. He stayed in the back unless he was actively ejecting someone from the premises. What he thought he was doing badgering this soft uptowner—

Robbie ground his teeth and stomped over.

As soon as he saw Robbie, the Asian guy yelled something, spreading out his arms in welcome.

Robbie halted. The guy was in a Knicks jersey and flip-flops. Who wore flip-flops to an auto shop.

Ramón looked sharply from Robbie to the stranger, and then jerked his thumb at Robbie, stalking behind one of the toolboxes. Tommy, whose toolbox it was, cleared away from Ramón so the car he was working on was between them.

Robbie turned his back on the guy in the flip-flops and followed Ramón. He pulled one headphone sideways on his head. His ear was ringing.

“¿Lo conoces?” Ramón demanded, straight Spanish, with a sharp glare at the stranger. “He was asking for you. I've seen him before. Cuando toda esa mierda paso en verano, with the Feds, blowing holes in the street, all that. He's trouble, the kind nobody needs. Get back to work, yo me deshago de el.”

“Oye, yo hablo un poco poquito de Español, dude,” the guy said. “I'm from Arizona. And I'm not an idiot.”

Robbie peered around Ramón's elbow. The guy wasn't even looking at them, just staring around the shop, hands on his hips. Summer? The Feds?

He knew who wore flip flops to a garage; this was that Hulk guy.

“I know him,” Robbie muttered. “He's my business.” **Damn straight. I want a rematch.**

Ramón caught him by the arm and Robbie had to stop himself from slapping his hand away. “Por qué?” Ramón demanded. “Por la verga? No. That life's not for you, not for anyone. Este cabron picked a fight with La Leyenda! Es un pendejo peligroso. Don't get mixed up with him.”

“I heard that!” the guy called over his shoulder.

Robbie groaned. “I know. Trust me, I know this guy. We...were in the same foster house, we go back. I'll see what he wants and tell him no.”

“Don't let him talk you into anything,” Ramón warned him.

“I know what I'm doing,” Robbie said.

Ramón stared down skeptically at him through his reading glasses.

“Thanks,” Robbie added. “I got this.”

Ramón shook his head and grunted.

Robbie stepped toward the newcomer. The Hulk. He had a ridiculous name. Ludvig Chao? “Let's talk outside,” Robbie said, and as he crossed the door, Canelo yelled from deep in the shop, “Reyes! If you're gonna gossip on the job, clock out for your break first!”

Robbie winced, and the Hulk guy raised one eyebrow. “Nevermind, let's talk while I work. Or just go home. Come back in closed-toed shoes.”

“I'll risk it,” the guy said, and flopped after Robbie toward the lockers.

Robbie fished through his box where he kept his personal tools. It was slow going, putting together a toolset on his budget, but he made do with second-hand stuff. He got the mirror, side-stepped around the Hulk guy, and returned to the Outback. Lowered himself to the creeper, grabbed a pair of line wrenches, and rolled back underneath.

“What, I don't get a _hi?_”

The guy's bare ankles were right within arm's reach of him as he scooted himself under the catalytic converter. Robbie could hit him hard with a wrench, right over the bone, and it would hurt for hours. **Teach him to respect our personal space.** “What do you want?” he demanded instead. He loosened the nuts that held the boxy catalytic converter to the hot upstream exhaust pipe, grabbed it with a rag, and started wiggling it open. The converter rattled as he moved it.

“I was in town,” the guy said. “Thought I'd hang.”

Robbie got the converter loose, put the mirror into the gap between it and the pipes, aimed his penlight into the hole beside the mirror, and peered inside. Gray honey-comb-pattern ceramic material—loose chunks of it. Probably banged on something, shattered the plates. “No, really. What do you want? Is it aliens? Mad scientists? Go Hulk at it. I’m not a hero like you, I got stuff to do here.” He scooted himself further back under the car to get at the converter's downstream fitting, keeping a foot to the side to keep any hot ceramic from burning him when he got it opened up.

The guy stooped down and peered under the car. “Dude, I'm not trying to have any conversation you need to actively avoid,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I'm in town for some paperwork stuff. Thought I'd stop and chat with my fellow super-people.”

_So go chat with somebody who cares,_ was on the tip of Robbie's tongue, but that wasn't a Robbie thing to say, was it. He set his wrenches over the nuts and cracked the fitting loose. “Thanks, I guess,” he said. “But I'm working. I got four cars left to service and two to diagnose, that's assuming we don't get any walk-ins.” _Get lost. Wait, no. Thanks for stopping by—augh, that sounds like I'm the receptionist._ He straightened his earphones, let Speed Demon's _Proposal Modesto_ thunder through his skull. Conversation over.

He got the back end of the converter loose, leaving it dangling by the clips that held it to the frame, and as he'd expected, loose chunks of ceramic catalytic material rained down out of the gap. He peeked in with the mirror and saw the downstream side was packed solid with broken bits. A few had made it into the downstream exhaust pipe, too; he felt them rattling when he bumped it.

He scooted back out and grabbed some needlenose pliers. Converter needed replacement, but like hell was the client going to pay for it today; they needed this heap running. He used the pliers and the wrench to break up the blockage and scoop out the chunks so the exhaust could get out. There'd be some interesting emissions coming out of this car until the client came back with the money.

Movement out of the corner of his eye: the Hulk guy was still there, waving under the car at him. Robbie pulled one headphone off again and glared at him. “_What_ are you doing?” the guy demanded.

“Working,” Robbie snarled. He winced, breathed, listened to the music. “Sorry. The cat's plugged. Uh...the car can't breathe.”

The guy lay down flat on his back next to the car, peering at the undercarriage. “How'd all that gravel get into the exhaust pipes?”

“It's not gravel.” Robbie used the pliers to pass over a nice big fragment for him to look at. “It's the catalytic material. Detoxifies the exhaust. Careful, it's hot.”

The guy licked his finger and poked it, rolled it over. The saliva crackled against the ceramic. “Wow. That...that is incredibly dumb.”

“I confirmed the exhaust restriction,” Robbie snapped, fishing around in the converter with his wrench. He didn't have enough room or hands to get the light and mirror and the wrench into the opening at the same time, so he was doing it blind.

“No, no, I mean, it's obvious you're right. But you've got this fragile material in a thin-walled metal box hanging from the underside of a vehicle that's expected to traverse uneven ground at speed. That's just asking for failure.”

Robbie shrugged, swept the converter with the wrench. Pulled out and peeked in with the mirror. It was just gravel all the way in. He had to keep going. He used his rag to protect his hand from the heat and shook the converter.

“You could build it with small blocks of ceramic, secured independently to the wall. You could build it so there's _no_ strain on the ceramic. This is completely unnecessary.”

“This is probably the cheapest way to build one,” Robbie said.

The Hulk guy's face twisted in disgust.

“There might be aftermarket cat converters like you're talking about,” Robbie allowed. “For, like, offroading.”

“Still,” the guy said. “You know, I can hear your headphones from here.”

Robbie reached up to put his phones back over his ears.

“No, wait, sorry. Look. Is it okay if I hang out? Cause. I don't know anybody in town, and, hey! Cars! Engines are cool. You learn stuff. Little lower-tech than I usually work with—”

“High tech's not always better,” Robbie interrupted.

“I know, you've got that muscle car, right? Runs a little, uh, _hot?_”

**Heh. You might say so.**

“I don't want to talk about that here,” Robbie said.

“What, your baby?” He lowered his voice. “Okay, secret identity. I can dig it.”

Robbie's mouth twisted. The Charger wasn't his _baby._ He wasn't some car tuner who fell in love with inanimate objects because everybody he knew despised him. **Wow. Watch it.** He did love it—it had the most powerful engine he had ever personally put his hands on, it had beautiful lines, he could take Gabe safely to school, go grocery shopping without consulting the bus tables, he could win races against boosted cars half its weight—but it was his prison more than his freedom.

He got the cat converter unplugged and jammed a piece of steel mesh into the hole, praying it would keep more ceramic fragments from rattling down the pipe into the muffler. Tightened everything back together, got in the car and cranked the engine again. Sounded much happier.

The Hulk guy coughed from behind the car.

Robbie shut the Outback off before it could poison anybody in the shop and got his clipboard, worked up his notes. The protective rubber boot of the right CV joint was cracking and leaking grease; the joint itself was bound to fail from road grit getting into it and needed urgent replacement. New cat converter, of course. Battery was showing major wear. Interior could use some detail work. Tires were just about worn out. Transmission fluid was about fifty thousand miles overdue for a change. Client would maybe approve ten percent of this work. Like, they'd probably just drop in their own battery and call it a day.

He groaned. Nobody did preventive maintenance in Hillrock Heights, they just screwed their cars up working on them at home or dragged them in when they stopped running, like this one.

“Long night?” Hulk guy asked.

Robbie clenched his pen in his fist, overhand stabbing grip, then forced himself to drop it in his lap. That was an Eli impulse. Robbie Reyes did not stab people through the temple with ballpoint pens. “I don't want to talk about that here,” he repeated. “_Why_ are you here? I don't know you.”

Hulk guy looked miffed. “We took out that purple thing together!”

“And?”

“You hit me with your car! Twice!”

“I'm _not_ sorry.” Robbie dropped his voice to a hiss. “You show up, throwing cars, picking fights with my neighbors—”

“They were shooting at me!” Hulk guy hissed back.

“Did it hurt?”

“That's not the point.”

“You don't have a point. Why are you really here?”

Hulk guy's mouth flattened and he stared at Robbie, examining him. There was plenty weird to see. The slanting symmetrical scars on his scalp where the hair didn't grow anymore, which he'd camouflaged as the borders of his faux-hawk. The hard silvery V-emblem on his forehead that he told people was a tattoo. The rust-colored iris of his right eye, which he blamed on an infection. Robbie clenched his teeth and his lip curled. He shook his head hard. Breathed. “I was concerned,” Hulk guy said at last. “It's a tough side-job. It helps to have people to talk about it.”

**Fuck him. Condescending green bastard, showing up in your place of work, jeopardizing your secret identity. You know what? We should string him along. Make nice. Take him out to the national forest, and while his back is turned, hit him in the head with a crowbar. Quick, before he can change. You can do it. You got one o'those trustworthy faces.**

Robbie clenched and unclenched his fist. _Everything you say is bullshit._

**That's not fair. You don't even believe that.**

All the anger-management tip-sheets agreed that social isolation made anger and panic worse. As irritating as this guy was, he was offering something Robbie desperately needed. “Thanks,” he said stiffly.

“I don't mean to intrude,” the guy said.

Robbie gave him his _talking to Gabe's teachers_ smile. It was a normal, trustworthy, non-serial-killing smile, and it felt odd, like a too-small shoe. “What was your name again?”

Hurt flashed across the guy's face. “Amadeus. Amadeus Cho.”

“Sorry.” He wiped his hand off on his coveralls and held it out to shake. “Robbie Reyes.”

“I remember.”

Now Robbie felt like a dick. “We should catch up later. Sunday. Gabe and I like to hang out at the park.”

Amadeus grinned. “No can do, flying back to NYC on Friday. Hey, you're so busy, I could help.”

“No.”

An affronted glare from Hulk guy.

Robbie sighed. “Don't touch anything. Don't stand under anything. Don't get in the way. And don't sue us if you hurt yourself, okay?”

Amadeus raised his hands, palms up, and then clasped them behind his back. “No touching.”

“Great.”

After the cat converter job—_please, please come back so we can fix this properly, because while it does run, it’s not safe to run it near anything with lungs—_there was an '07 Sentra with a parasitic draw. An electrical job that ordinarily would have gone to Cordova, because Robbie was supposed to be just a G&S and Ramón had completed all his ASE study for a certification in electrical system diagnostics and repair while he was in prison.

**Screw him. You can figure this out.**

_I know. I got this._

He popped the hood, got the ammeter hooked up in series to the battery, found a power reading of twenty-two thousand milliamps, with the ignition off. That was...high.

**There's your problem.**

_No, no. Shut up. This is—it's a late-model thing. Car's not all the way shut down yet. I just drove it into the bay._

Robbie went out to the parking lot to polish a Taurus's cloudy plastic headlights while he waited for the Sentra’s computer to go to sleep and stop sucking power out of the battery. Came back to an ammeter reading of 1834 milliamps and Amadeus Cho in the Sentra’s passenger seat absorbed in his smart-watch.

Robbie detoured to the bookshelves on the outside wall of Canelo's office where they kept the service manuals, and found a manual for an '05 Sentra, a bootlegged version in a three-ring binder. He flipped through to the wiring diagram, prayed the '05 and '07 models had the same wiring scheme, opened the fuse box, and started pulling fuses, watching for the amperage to drop down to something reasonable. Like fifty. Fifty milliamps was supposed to be okay. 1834 milliamps had the customer commenting, “Fucking car’s always dead, I have to go out at midnight to run the engine so it can start in the morning.”

F1 pulled, no change. Jam it back in, careful not to bend the prongs. F2. F3. Please be F12; the trunk light used Fuse 12 and those were always shorting out. F4, 5, 6, 7, F8 and suddenly the amperage dropped down to 0.038. Thirty-eight milliamps was normal. Draw was coming through Fuse 8’s circuit.

_Shit._ That was not a bad trunk light.

He was really hoping for a bad trunk light.

“Ooh, ignition ACC,” Amadeus yelled from beside him, through Robbie’s earphones. Robbie spun on him. He hadn't seen him leave the car, with the hood being up. “What’s that mean?”

Robbie breathed in serenity, breathed out violence. He slid his phones off one ear again. “ACC is accessories. All the useless crap people put in their cars. GPS. Cigarette lighter. This car, probably that aftermarket speaker system.”

Low in the front doors near the hinges, big black speaker-heads with shiny decals stood out against the beige plastic.

“Thought you liked loud music,” Amadeus remarked.

“Not when it weighs down the car or bleeds the battery,” Robbie griped. “Client might’ve put this in himself. Who knows what’s shorting. This shouldn’t be drawing off the battery at all. Might have to open up the doors and go over the wires by hand.”

Amadeus cocked his head at the car, skeptical. “Sounds tedious.”

“No kidding. I’m gonna be stuck here all day, I don’t get to charge hours until I diagnose the problem, and pulling a fuse doesn’t qualify.”

“No, no, no. Look. It’s process of elimination, right? And all the wires that enter the door, you can access those, right?”

“I get what you’re saying, but our amp probe’s not sensitive enough. That’s the one that goes around the wire—”

“Amp probe? No, you just need a little hand-held radio, run it back and forth across the wire really fast.”

“What, listen to the static?” Robbie pictured it. Radios were super sensitive. Just waving your hand over the antenna could make them buzz. It might work. “But stereo systems, they’re on a single circuit. If it’s live, it’s all live. No, the ignition ACC shouldn’t be drawing power at all while the car's off, that’s what it’s for, to isolate non-essential systems—”

Robbie had a thought. He flipped through the Sentra repair manual looking for the location of the relay switches.

Amadeus flicked on his watch. “There's a spot where the wires are close together—could be a short allowing it to draw off the battery with the ignition off—”

Robbie pulled up the cover over the relay switches. Black plastic cubes about an inch square, plugged into the switchboard, that controlled which circuits got power at any given time.

“You think one of those is worn out?”

“These are solid-state relays, so probably not,” Robbie said. He studied the set of relays, compared them to the wiring diagram in the manual.

“That one,” Amadeus said, and pulled it right out of the damn car.

A jolt of heat sparked through Robbie's chest. “I told you not to touch anything,” he hissed.

“This is the one,” Amadeus said, unrepentant.

Robbie grabbed the switch, inspected the prongs. Someone, probably the client, had wrapped a foil gum wrapper around two of the prongs to bypass it, stop it from shutting off the current. This was, in fact, the problem. “How'd you know?”

“Dude.” Amadeus waved his phone in front of him. “I can read.”

Robbie hadn't even had the chance to untangle the diagram, and he'd been staring at it for longer than Amadeus had. “What, you memorized the wiring harness?” Robbie demanded, incredulous.

“Yup.” Amadeus tucked his thumbs in the waistband of his swim trunks, thought better of it, and rested one palm on the edge of the engine compartment. “I'm awesome.”

Robbie picked the foil out from around the prongs of the relay, re-installed it, and replaced the F8 fuse. He checked the ammeter. The draw on the battery was gone. “Okay.”

“You're welcome. My question is, why—”

“Customer didn't want to lose the radio station presets whenever he shut the car down.”

Amadeus glared at the car. “Huh. _Wow._ That's—”

“I know.”

“That is impressively stupid.”

Robbie's jaw ticked. “It's not—don't call that _stupid_, they found the right relay switch, then bypassed it on purpose. This was irresponsible.”

Amadeus' mouth dropped into an 'oh.' “Right. Your brother, sorry, I'm not the most sensi—”

Before Amadeus interrupted him, Robbie had been about to say, ‘_Stupid_ is putting the floor mat in on top of the accelerator and then screaming about uncontrollable acceleration.’ But when Amadeus said, 'Your brother,' time slowed. Heat jolted through him again, stronger and all-encompassing. He saw that Amadeus' hand was resting on the front quarter panel, fingers stretched over edge of the engine compartment. He grabbed the hood and lifted it up off the hood prop, and then he let it drop.

_Wait,_ he thought as the hood began to fall.

Hot anger changed to cold horror and he caught it before it could crush Amadeus' hand. But only barely.He slammed his own hand under the hood instead.

“Dude!” Amadeus exclaimed, lifting the hood for him. “Are you okay?”

Robbie shoved him away. “Don't!” The back of his right hand was pale. Blood oozed over two of his knuckles.

“I would've been fine,” Amadeus assured him. “Well. The car might not be. You didn't have to do that, dude, that looks painful.”

Robbie put his headphone back over his ear and slowly opened and closed his hand. The pain was slow to reach him, but when it did, a maddening ache spread up and down his arm. He hadn't damaged anything structural, but he'd done a number on himself.

**So close,** Eli remarked, mocking. Eli hadn't tried to crush Amadeus' hand. That was Robbie who'd gotten angry and lashed out, Robbie who was out of control. And Robbie was still angry.

“It's dangerous working here,” Robbie said, putting on a nitrile glove to protect the wound. “Really, you should just—”

“Get you a soda,” Amadeus said, and disappeared out through the lobby before Robbie had the chance to finish.

Robbie stared down at the Sentra, gripping his throbbing hand. He’d found and fixed the electrical bleed. Taken half an hour. He should be proud.

**Let’s go teach him a lesson tonight. Listen to him, making ** _ **implications** _ ** about Gabbie. Incinerate the big green pustule.**

_No._

**Fix up your hand.**

_No._

**It’s been three fucking weeks! You’re losing it! You’re pushing yourself into a psychotic break for no reason!**

_Every time we burn up it gets worse,_ Robbie thought, clenching down on his hand. _You’ve been lying to me from the beginning._

**Don’t change the fact that you can’t stop,** Eli replied.

_Already did._

**Sure. Tick-tick, kiddo, **Eli sneered.** Put on the one about Cletus Kasady.**

Robbie put on the podcast about Cletus Kasady.

He’d switched work-bays to the one with the lift so he could raise up a Tundra for a differential service, busy with his socket wrench and trying to tune out the excited young man in his headphones narrating Cletus Kasady's serial murders in salacious detail, when Amadeus Cho returned to the shop bearing a six-foot sub sandwich and a case of Cokes. The cheap kind, that came in cans instead of bottles and had corn syrup instead of sugar. _He's bribing his way back in here,_ Robbie thought when he saw Amadeus deposit the food in the break room.

Marty, at work on an ancient Camry, cheered and offered Amadeus a fist-bump when he returned to the shop.

“Got you an icepack,” Amadeus said, leaning against a column near Robbie's workbay. He waved a little blue first-aid gel pack.

Robbie grunted and kept working on the bolts that held the cover on the differential. The gears that converted the driveshaft's rotation into power for the wheels were housed in a big metal clamshell case visible from just in front of the rear bumper. It opened straight up-and-down, and sixteen bolts held the edges shut. Differential fluid began to weep from the lower bolt-holes and into his plastic catch-basin as Robbie worked his way around. After he got the last bolt loose, the cover was just clinging to the differential housing by habit and by the stickiness of the gasket around the rim. Robbie pried it off and a gallon of viscous brown fluid gushed out.

“Got you an icepack!” Amadeus yelled, louder.

Robbie didn't have time to stop work to wrap an icepack over the back of his hand. “Thanks,” he said, and inspected the big gears inside the differential, gloved hands feeling the ring gear for metal fragments, for worn or damaged teeth. “You should go.”

Amadeus stepped under the Tundra with him. “Dude,” he said seriously, and Robbie took off one disposable glove so he could slip one earphone off. “I'm not gonna go green on your work buddies. I'm the friendly Hulk. You don't have to test me.”

Now Robbie _really_ felt like a dick. _I wasn't testing your control, I was just genuinely trying to cut your fingers off with my customer's car._ “Sorry,” he said lamely. He sat on the floor, peeled the old gasket out of the differential cover, and polished the edges of the case and the cover with fine steel wool, then a dry shop cloth. Unwrapped a new gasket, fitted it against the cover, and then started bolting cover and gasket back into place. Whitcha-whitcha-whitcha went the ratchet.

Amadeus lingered beside him as he worked, chewing on a Snickers, watching Robbie, watching Marty, watching Ramón, gazing at the toolboxes. As Robbie consulted the model's Chilton manual and switched from his ratchet wrench to his torque wrench for the final tightening, Amadeus asked, “Wait, what are you doing now?”

“Torquing to spec,” Robbie said, giving one bolt after another a final pull, just until the wrench clicked at thirty foot-pounds.

Amadeus paged through the manual on the ground behind him. “But the friction and the elastic modulus of the bolt would change over time with surface oxidation and repeated stress cycles. How could they expect to know the exact right torque a bolt needs to stay seated without taking into account the age, use, and weather conditions the bolt is exposed to?”

“I don't know, you're just supposed to torque it to spec,” Robbie said, irritated. “Sometimes you get cars in, the customers were messing around, things are either rattling loose or warped from overtightening. Or somebody at a shop used an airgun to tighten it and you gotta get the breaker bar to work it loose.”

“It's arbitrary,” Amadeus complained.

“It just has to be close enough,” Robbie said, torquing the last bolt. “Close is better than wrong.” He got a bottle of fresh differential fluid and a funnel and re-filled the case. Noted his labor time, lowered the Tundra. Next car.

Ford Fiesta: inspection, oil, lube, filter. Back to his usual bay, no lift, just jacks, on his back on the creeper under the car with his penlight.

Robbie caught himself actually listening to Eli's Cletus Kasady podcast, now describing a woman found covered in knife slashes, her body wrapped in a bedsheet and deposited in a motel dumpster, a high-end escort with a young daughter at home—

**God bless hookers,** Eli sighed, and Robbie hit his head on the Fiesta's swaybar.

He really was losing it. Robbie already knew Eli thought of sex-workers like a normal person thought of fast-food. He shouldn't be hurting himself at work. He had to just tune him out. Focus on the car.

Frantic Spanish echoed from across the shop at a high enough volume to cut through his headphones. “But I've been coming here for twenty years!” an old woman yelled. “I trust you! Everyone else overcharges. What do you mean, you can't fix it? Just look at the car!”

He pulled his phones off one ear and heard flip-flopping as Amadeus followed the ruckus. Robbie rolled himself back out from under the Fiesta to go corral him.

Canelo was talking to the customer. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Benavidez. I truly am. You've always been one of our best customers. But for this problem, you really should take it back to the dealership. Your warranty should still cover it.”

Robbie stood and looked over at the lobby, where Canelo was talking down a tiny white-haired lady in a floral dress. Robbie remembered her. She was the original owner of a yellow Pinto that had come in for tune-ups a couple times a year since before Robbie had started working here.

“My son told me over and over, Mama you have to get a more reliable car, new, safe, well now I've got one, and it's so reliable it's already got a problem you can't even fix!”

Tommy was standing just behind Canelo. There was a newer Fusion in Tommy's bay, plugged into the scan tool and the laptop computer: Mrs. Benavidez's reliable new car. Amadeus was in Lenny's workbay, right next to Tommy's where the Fusion was parked, hands on his hips, watching. Robbie slipped around behind the toolboxes and joined him, gave him a warning glare.

“I'm sure it's something minor,” Canelo said. “It’s not returning a critical error code, the car drives fine, but, well, it’s the computer system. Our scan tool doesn’t read all the codes for this model year.”

“If it’s so minor—”

“That doesn’t mean it should be ignored,” Canelo said hurriedly.

“Can’t you just look at my car and find what's wrong?” Mrs. Benavidez pleaded.

“Not with a vehicle this complex,” Canelo said. “Fuel efficiency, side-curtain airbags, climate control, lane-keeping assist, automatic braking—there’s just too many systems to check. We really do need the computer, and our diagnostic tool can’t understand what your car is trying to tell us. It’s a proprietary error code. You need to take it to a dealership, they have a scan tool that can read it.”

“But can't you just look at my car?”

Canelo patiently began to explain again about the diagnostic tool and the proprietary error code.

“I fix this problem,” Amadeus Cho broke in, with his 'poco poquito' of Spanish. Everyone stared at him: Canelo, Ramón Cordova, Tommy, Lenny, Marty, Mrs. Benavidez. Robbie kicked him in the ankle. Amadeus turned to Robbie. “So...what's the problem, exactly?”

“We don't have a subscription for Ford's diagnostic software and her car has a proprietary error code that our generic scan tool can't read.”

“Wait, wait,” Amadeus muttered. “You have to pay Ford money. To fix Ford's car?”

“To read proprietary error codes on late models, yeah. We don't get a lot of late model cars here, though, so it doesn't usually come up.”

“What a racket.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Ford has an incentive to make buggier cars because Ford gets a kick-back every time the car has to go to a Ford dealership for repair.”

Robbie didn't literally mean for Amadeus to tell him about it. He just nodded. “We could read it if we had the subscription. But it's over a thousand dollars a year for each brand. Plus the Ford scan tool. So.”

“You can find out what's wrong with my car?” Mrs. Benavidez interrupted in English.

Amadeus jumped. “Yes, ma'am.”

“Who's this kid?” Canelo demanded.

“Amadeus Cho, CEO of Olympus Group. _And_ Computer Science Director,” Amadeus said, projecting a hologram of himself in a suit and tie out of his smart-watch.

_**What the fuck. **_Robbie stared at him, his skin crawling. He'd thought he was just the Hulk. Some random guy with powers. Not some guy with _power._ Robbie took a half-step back. Deep in his head, Eli perked up, watched Amadeus, examined the hologram.

“Go on,” said Canelo slowly.

“I need wifi,” Amadeus said. “Don't worry, Mr. Canelo, you're not gonna lose your favorite customer.”

Canelo raised one eyebrow, and Mrs. Benavidez beamed.

The entire shop crowded around in Tommy's workbay as Amadeus used the laptop. Through the web browser, he remote-accessed an unfamiliar desktop, pulled up a bunch of applications with bland gray buttons and streaming windows of code, and pulled up Ford's diagnostic test code subscription website. Robbie didn't know much about computer programming, but he knew the basics of how hacking was done. And what he suspected Amadeus was doing was a brute-force attack on the Ford website using the remote computer system.

After about five minutes of streaming numbers in one of the windows, an email alert beeped and Amadeus opened it. It was a form email from Ford, thanking him for his subscription, and giving him an access code of random letters and numbers. Amadeus copied the access code, closed out of the remote desktop, and accessed the Ford site from the shop's laptop. From there, he simply entered the access code in to the Subscriber page, downloaded the current year's scan tool software, and installed them on the shop's scan tool. Robbie took over, opened the scan tool interface, and requested another diagnostic on Mrs. Benavidez's car. This time, instead of XXX, actual error codes came up: P1578, ETC Power Less Than Demand. P1581, Electronic Throttle Monitor Malfunction.

“Tommy,” Robbie said, moving out of the way and ushering him to the laptop.

“Sweet,” Tommy said, looking over the suddenly-readable scan data.

“Can you fix it?” Mrs. Benavidez asked.

“Probably,” said Tommy.

Canelo leaned in to look, too. “Now we know where to start looking physically,” he said in Spanish. “We'll work up an estimate. Do you have anyone to come pick you up?”

“My son is working, he manages a hardware store, and my daughter has her children home, it's summer, I couldn't ask her to—”

“Reyes, don't start anything too involved, we'll need you available to run Mrs. Benavidez home and back.”

“My car doesn't have air-con,” Robbie said.

“So roll down the windows. What's wrong with you, put an air conditioner in that heap before you get heat stroke and die.”

Robbie clenched his jaw. The Charger was fine. He didn't need another compressor dragging on his accessory belt and taking up space in his engine compartment; he was always comfortable in his car. Eli was offended, too. **Fuck you, you old hog.** “Okay,” Robbie said instead.

Canelo ushered Mrs. Benavidez into the small lobby with its coffee pot and popcorn machine and five-year-old magazines.

Robbie beckoned Amadeus back to his workbay and the Ford Fiesta. “If you're so rich, why'd you just steal us a software subscription,” he asked, low.

“It's the principle of the thing,” said Amadeus airily. “And I'm not _that_ rich. Anymore.”

“Okay, well your principles better not get the shop in trouble,” Robbie said. “We get sued, this whole place'd be shut down. Canelo barely makes payroll half the time.”

“Huh,” Amadeus said with alarming equanimity. “Well, if Ford traces the attack, they'll just find Olympus Group. I'll tell them I was cracking their system to find vulnerabilities and they'll give me a finder's fee if they know what's what. No harm, no foul.”

“You better be right.”

“I'm always right.”

_ **Wow.** _

Amadeus hung around until Canelo called Robbie over to drive Mrs. Benavidez home to her apartment in Boyle Heights. He was gone when Robbie returned. Robbie helped himself to some of the sub sandwich from the break room. Turkey, cheddar, pickles. It was pretty good.

He saw Canelo grinning at the scan tool as he clocked back in to finish his shift.

**I already heard this podcast. Put on that band that does those corridos about Pablo Escobar.**

* * *

At three PM, it was time to leave the shop to go pick Gabe up from middle school.

Robbie pulled up to the curb and leaned on the Charger’s passenger door as he watched the throng of teenagers spill out the front doors and out into the parking lot: some to buses, some to parents. Gabe appeared at the top of the stairs as the crowd thinned, a blonde lady in a polo shirt at his side. He looked subdued, leaning back in his power chair, but he perked up as Robbie jogged up the steps toward him.

“How was your day, Bud? You learn a lot?”

“I guess,” Gabe said. “I learned a lotta ways people lie when they write things. Only we’re not supposed to say lie, ‘cause that’s rude, we’re supposed to say ‘inconsistency.’”

“Yeah, that’s…that’s really important,” Robbie said.

“It’s hard to figure out when they’re lying because they say tons and tons of things. And you have to read them all over and over. And it’s hard to remember what doesn’t match.”

“It takes a lot of work to figure out when someone’s hiding something from you,” Robbie agreed. **Which is why you’re so gullible, Robbie.** “I’m so proud of you, Gabe.”

“Thanks, Robbie.”

“Are you okay? Did something happen?”

Gabe shrugged.

Robbie turned on the young woman, the teaching aide. “Anything unusual happen today?”

“Robbie, don’t scare Sunny,” Gabe protested, grabbing his elbow.

“I’m not gonna—”

“You scared JP really bad and now he doesn’t walk me out anymore,” Gabe continued.

The woman, Sunny, raised one eyebrow. She had dyed-blonde hair in a ponytail, a utilitarian watch, kakhi slacks. “I get it, you’re worried. But he's okay. Just kid stuff, I guess.”

Robbie wasn’t worried. He was _concerned_. Talk about kid stuff, Gabe spent all day at _middle school _this whole spring, and when Robbie had been at middle school, he’d seen a kid get his teeth kicked out. _He’d_ almost had his own teeth kicked out a couple times. He’d had to punch two other kids’ teeth out. Bunch of hormonal psychopaths locked in a building together.

“Mrs. Jules says I can’t sit with Mateo anymore,” Gabe admitted, while Robbie was still trying to organize his thoughts.

_What._ “But you're friends with Mateo.” **That Jules bitch. Your goddamn nemesis, Robbie.** “Your TA—”

“Me,” said Sunny.

“—helps you both with algebra.”

Gabe shrugged. Sunny said, “She...might have a point. I mean, your brother and Matty, they're both great kids, but together, they're a little...you know.”

Robbie did not know. He stared at her until her fake smile faded.

“They were playing the penis game,” Sunny said.

“_Don't,_” Gabe protested.

_**What?**_ “What's the—”

“Wasn't this like five years ago for you?” Sunny asked. “You never played— One boy says penis. And then his buddy says penis, a little louder. And they go back and forth until somebody gets reprimanded.”

Robbie vaguely remembered hearing kids scream _PENIS _at each-other across the library. He raised an eyebrow at Gabe.

Gabe giggled and stared at the wall.

“Yeah, she said penis, didn't she,” Robbie said.

“Penis,” Gabe whispered, and giggled some more.

“Gabe, you liked sitting next to Mateo. Now he's not allowed to sit by you anymore because you two were talking while everyone else was trying to listen to Mrs. Jules.”

“I'm sorry, Robbie. But, it was funny!” Gabe grinned. “It was really funny.”

Robbie slumped and rubbed his forehead. It was hard to be mad when Gabe was happy. He was overjoyed that Gabe was alert and engaged enough to get into trouble at school for playing stupid games with his classmates.

“You guys have any other classes together?”

“Earth Science,” Gabe said. “But science is less boring than math. It’s a lot less boring than math because, Robbie, sometimes Mr. Cortez sets things on fire! And right now there’s pictures of birds. It’s really easy to pay attention to Mr. Cortez.” He frowned. “Robbie, do you think I hurt Mrs. Jules’ feelings?”

**She’s a vain, power-hungry, sanctimonious cunt.** “Uh…it’s rude to talk in class. It’s really rude to say penis in front of people who aren’t doctors or nurses. But I think she separated you two because she thought you’d have an easier time listening to her if you couldn’t talk to Mateo all the time.” **She’s a bully.**

“Maybe if I say sorry, she’ll let Mateo sit in the corner with me again,” Gabe said.

Sunny gave Robbie a thumbs-up, thumbs-down. “You two good? Need a hand out to the car?”

“Yeah, we’re fine. Pleased to meet you, Sunny,” Robbie said. “Gabe, if you show her you can pay attention when it’s time to listen, maybe she’ll let Mateo sit with you.” _She’d better._

**If she knows what’s good for her.**

_I'm not gonna hurt Gabe's math teacher. Fuck off._

**Sure you won't.** **Tick-tick.**

* * *

Amadeus shut himself into his residential suite at the DoubleTree Hilton, dropped his groceries on the floor, and breathed deep through a cramp in his throat. Those sub sandwiches he'd bought for the mechanics had put him in the mood for something better. Short-ribs, some stir-fry with vegetables he'd had to Google at the market, home-made calamari as if the short-ribs weren't enough meat, and to finish it off, a half-gallon of Rocky Road.

He texted his sister Maddie. _Got a feast in the works, you should stop by._

As of yesterday, Amadeus Cho was no longer the CEO of Olympus Group. He no longer had access to its remaining three billion in assets. He had a severance package, a pension in case he somehow blew all his severance money (thanks, sis, point taken), and zero responsibilities other than, you know, being a totally awesome Hulk and saving the world and feeding himself and doing his laundry.

He put his battered laptop on the floor so he could drag the suite's table into the kitchen for a bigger work surface, then got to work organizing and peeling and chopping. Slit the silver-skin on the ribs so it could marinate faster. He ran out of cutting boards, so he sliced the squid into rings on a sheet of cardboard from the box for the six-foot plasma screen he'd propped up against one wall. Soon all the hotel-provided bowls and plates were filled with his mis-en-place. The ribs and the calamari were soaking.

He checked his phone, in case he'd missed a text alert. Nothing.

He thought of where he'd been last year. On the road, on the run, tailing after a Hellenic hero and searching for his sister, stealing and scrounging, just a squishy human with a ginormous brain seething with rage. Well, now he'd found Maddie. Hercules was off doing his own thing. He had enough money to keep himself busy for a few years, and enough power, now that he was the Hulk, to stop a cruise missile. He didn't even have to worry about CEO shit anymore. So why was he in the dumps now?

He could shrink himself later. Right now, he had a Hulk-sized problem to tackle. East Los Angeles' weird, violent Ghost Rider-type thing. Robbie Reyes.

Ghost Riders weren't superheroes so much as cryptids. Nobody ever screamed at the sky, “If only Ghost Rider were here!” while watching a bank robbery. Laura Kinney, the new-and-far-better-looking Wolverine, had met one briefly in a demon fight in Las Vegas. It hadn't gone well and the Rider hadn't stuck around for chitchat. The old Champions team, Warren Worthington III's short-lived pet project, used to have a Ghost Rider on board back in the day: Johnny Blaze, a demon-possessed Hollywood stuntman-turned-burning-skeleton, who, though a nice normal guy in his human form, was creepy as shit and had a tendency to go too far in the heat of battle. No other Ghost Riders had ever sat down to write a mission report like Johnny Blaze had, but the sparse reports on the others held to a common pattern of arson, intimidation, and bad teamwork. Except for the steady job, Robbie Reyes fit right in.

Amadeus had had the pleasure of fighting both against and alongside Reyes. He was fast, strong, and weirdly dense when punched. His big black muscle car could drive itself and fight alongside him, and he could melt his body up and out through its roof like a lethal burning jack-in-the-box. He could teleport. His flaming head wasn't a skull, per se, more a stylized engine with teeth. He could pull chains out of nowhere, at least a hundred yards of them, sometimes with nasty-looking harpoon tips. Amadeus wasn't sure if he could talk or not in Ghost form; he mostly made angry car noises. He was never at ease: either attacking at full speed, or rigid with tension.

Like Amadeus, he was a heavy hitter, oh, boy, was he ever. But Amadeus fought aliens. Robbie Reyes fought street crime.

Amadeus waved at the Kinect on top of his plasma screen, woke up the super-computer he'd strung together out of five PlayStations. Just a little thing, enough RAM to build a virtual neural net trained in semantic analysis that could scour news stories and public and confidential records for him. A graph came up, arranged by date and casualty score: all the concussions, broken bones, burns, and other grievous bodily harms suffered by those Reyes had probably clashed with. Also, property damage. Amadeus had a separate set of data points for all the property damage, which was frankly impressive. Reyes left a swath of burned-out drug labs, exploded ammunition depots, and melted cars. Also, a lot of random exploding palm trees and gas tanks and a few brush-fires, which were probably accidental.

To his credit, Reyes's activities weren't all assault and arson. He'd hauled an over-turned city bus to safety when it was teetering over the edge of a bridge. He'd rescued thirty-two children from a human-trafficking operation. Occasionally LA seemed to need a little assault and arson; some ex-military mercenaries had been terrorizing the East Side last year, until Reyes trashed their HUM-Vs and beat them half to death.

In his hometown, he was controversial. People couldn't even agree what to call him. Robot Racer, La Leyenda, El Diablo, Turbo Terminator. Some people loved him, some hated him, everybody feared him and knew to get off the street if the flaming muscle car screamed past. The cops had him listed as a supervillain, but with an asterisk. Who knew what that meant.

The superhero community was by necessity self-policing. Generally, if the “right sort of people” liked their local enhanced individual's particular brand of chaos, that individual got to be called a “hero,” and other “heroes” left them alone. If people who hated them were the “wrong sort of people,” their opinion didn't count. And if the “right sort” thought that individual was a threat to the social order, all the other “heroes” got to gang up and take them out in a massive, destructive super-battle. This approach had several glaringly obvious weak points: who the “right sort” were (the US Military, perhaps?) and whether they were smart enough to understand what a powered person was actually doing (in the case of the US Military and his old friend Bruce Banner: hell no). But Amadeus actually _was_ smart enough to understand what a powered individual was doing. More importantly, he was willing to put in the time and energy to gather the information necessary to figure it out. He was not going to treat Reyes like the other so-called heroes had treated Bruce.

No matter how cruel and excessive his activities appeared.

He waved at the Kinect, expanded a particularly hot casualty score on the graph. In an incident at a shipping depot, two people had had to have their right hands amputated due to crushing injuries. That's _one_ way to curtail gun violence.

Some vigilantes cooperated with law enforcement and provided evidence, confessions, hand-cuffed crooks. Reyes generally made an anonymous 911 call after attacking, but the evidence was usually burned to ash, and most of his victims didn't stay a day in jail; they just went straight to the hospital and didn't come out for weeks. Three hundred and twenty-six ICU stays. Eighty-nine of those people were currently drawing Federal disability. Amadeus zoomed in on one node: Julian Cooper, twenty-six, impaired vision, cervical spinal fusion, ankle fusion, PTSD.

There was a grim logic to it. The US criminal justice system was a shit-show. Put a guy in jail, and if he was really important, he'd get bailed out by his organized crime buddies. Put a nobody in jail, and he'd get sucked into a prison gang if he wasn't connected already, come out as a fresh new cog in the street-crime machine, jobs to do, drugs to sell, people to kill. Put a guy in traction, and he'd spend three weeks getting sponge baths and reconsidering his life choices.

But still. Crushing people's hands?

Amadeus, and, yes, Bruce Banner, were proof that it was possible to control the level of damage you caused no matter how powerful you were. Just because Reyes was strong and on fire didn't mean he got a free pass for all the maiming he did while Ghost-Ridering around LA. Especially considering the deaths.

In the two years since LA's Ghost Rider had first appeared, five people had died of probable Reyes-inflicted injuries. Surgical complications, pneumonia, head trauma. A hospital was a dangerous place. Add in the very first incident consistent with Reyes' MO: a Hum-Vee melted in half on a freeway interchange, filled with heavy weapons and burned corpses. Six dead.

Killing was a line that Amadeus would not cross and could not excuse. Not with the kind of power he and Reyes had. If you couldn't be killed yourself, you had no business resorting to killing.

If Amadeus thought all this was some grand strategy by Reyes, he'd already be having very stern words with the guy. But he'd seen Ghost Rider in action. He was clever and strategic and rational, up to a point, but after that, he either powered down completely or went full-on feral. It made Amadeus wonder how much control he really had.

Roberto Reyes wasn't just a spectre in a flaming muscle car: he was also a human being with a job and a social security number. Reyes' name was extremely common and Canelo's Auto and Body had no electronic payroll records to break into, but Amadeus knew he had a younger brother, Gabe, also an extremely common name, who appeared to have cerebral palsy. Not so common.

If the Reyes brothers he'd found in the regional DHHS records were the correct Roberto and Gabriel, they had a very sympathetic story. A six-year-old boy discovered alone in an apartment with a one-year-old infant, no known relatives, the parents' location unknown. Shuffled through the foster system, always together for the humane reason of avoiding additional emotional trauma, and the practical reason that Roberto was handy to keep little Gabriel clean and fed and entertained. He'd penetrated Roberto's sealed juvenile court records: three serious fights, one of which was charged as assault. A week in Juvie at fourteen, where he sustained a boxer's fracture to his right hand. Street-racing arrests at fifteen and sixteen. At eighteen, Roberto was released from foster care, and managed to secure a lease, a job, and guardianship of his brother all inside six months, while attending high-school and maintaining a 3.8 GPA. Zero arrests, zero citations. Then La Leyenda appeared. Reyes dropped out, tested and passed his GED before his classmates graduated, and continued to work at Canelo's as an apparently law-abiding auto tech.

So that was what Amadeus knew about the Ghost Rider through public record and multiple violations of privacy law.

Today, he'd gotten a more personal view: Reyes had tried to maim him with the hood of a car, changed his mind at the last second, and bruised the absolute shit out of his own hand trying to protect Amadeus, even though Reyes knew he was a Hulk and couldn't get seriously injured. Not the picture of stability. But Amadeus had to give him credit for, you know, shutting his own hand in a car hood. Got those heroic protective instincts. And a giant, flashing berserk-button in the form of one Gabriel Reyes. Hoo-boy.

But maybe Robbie wasn't at his best when dealing with Amadeus. Hulks freaked people out. What else did he know? Robbie's coworkers weren't scared of him. He really, really loved cars. He was pretty sharp in a normal sort of way. And he listened to bilingual garage-scream-metal and podcasts about serial killers at deafening volume.

“Okay,” Amadeus muttered. “Ignore the serial killer obsession. Ignore the car hood. We got a guy with a chronically-ill brother, blue-collar job, superpowers, tragic backstory, anger issues like whoa, single-handedly boosted the local assault rate six times and the arson rate eleven times, but actual murders are down seventy percent due to reduced gang activity. Popularity fifty-fifty. Seems to be killing people by accident, but that hasn't happened for almost a year. What problem should Amadeus Cho, the Totally Awesome Hulk, address?”

Before Reyes remembered Amadeus, he'd stormed across the shop to save him from that big bouncer-type guy.

A timer on his smartwatch beeped to remind him to turn the ribs and stir the calamari rings. He used a pair of plastic forks and repositioned the meats in their marinades.

“I can't believe Ford charges people a thousand dollars a year for a subscription to diagnose their cars,” Amadeus exploded.

He sent another text. _Getting culinarily experimental here sis. _Still nothing. Fine. He had another half an hour before it was time to put the ribs in the oven.

He dug out his old laptop and started reading everything he could find on how a car's electronic diagnostic system worked.

_The Car Hacker's Handbook._ Ah-ha.

* * *

**Tick-tick-tick. Heh-heh.**

Robbie stared up with dead eyes at the gallon of hot motor oil rushing out of a Sebring's oil pan, inches past his face. First Monday of the month Canelo had a sale on oil changes, and he’d been on his back all day trying to keep up. They only had the one oil pit. Robbie, with his young knees and back and everything else, was the one churning through oil changes the old-fashioned way, on the creeper.

He had a sudden mad impulse to run his hand through the oil and lick it off.

It had been four weeks since he’d stopped changing.

His blood felt hot and his skin felt cold. His concentration faltered with the effort of putting all his fear and anger out of his mind. He smelled phantom scents: gasoline, antifreeze. When he blew his nose, it was black from soot. He was saying four Hail Marys a night, and he'd finally learned all the words. He felt less than half human, but that would pass when this...detox phase passed. And if it didn't pass, it didn't matter.

This wasn't the longest he'd ever gone without burning up into the Ghost Rider: after his first changes—after he'd died, and Eli had brought him back by binding himself to Robbie's soul—Robbie had had no intention of ever changing again, and he'd stayed human for months. Eli hadn't been happy about this, but Robbie was the human and Eli was the haunted car, therefore Robbie was in charge.

Cute theory.

Out in the sunny parking lot, a bird shat on the Charger's windshield and Robbie shuddered at the feel of it rolling down his glass.

He'd just taken a tenner. He'd have to wait for lunch to go wipe it off. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his uninjured hand, trying to dispel the cold crawling feeling.

Alejo whistled from across the shop. Alejo had been working on cars for longer than Canelo had been in business; if he thought something deserved a whistle, it definitely deserved a look. Robbie screwed the drain plug back in, rolled himself out, and stood up.

A skinny Asian guy in a suit was pushing a big white tool-chest across the center aisle. On top of the box, snarls of wire and circuit-boards screwed to several dinner-plate-sized chunks of particle-board. The guy in the suit was—Robbie squinted—was that Amadeus Cho? He'd said he was leaving town last week.

_Eli, is that Amadeus?_

A pause. **Why do you think I'd know?**

_You were a hitman. Didn't you have to be good with faces?_

**No. Kid, if you kill the wrong guy, that's not a problem, that just means you get to go again. **

Robbie clenched his jaw. Typical Eli. He stared at the intruder.

Different clothes, same age, same height, still completely out-of-place, same know-it-all attitude. Probably Amadeus. He'd only met the guy four times, that wasn't nearly enough to be sure.

“Thanks for agreeing to this demonstration on such short notice,” Probably-Amadeus Cho announced.

Canelo was with him, thumbs hooked in his suspenders, watching the circuit boards and the white box with interest. “Always happy to meet with industry professionals,” he said. _Especially when they bring us new toys,_ Robbie finished for him. “Tell the men about your prototype.”

Probably-Amadeus winked at Robbie. Definitely Amadeus. Why was he winking? “Well, first off,” Cho said, “your shop has been selected to win a free toolbox! Who here needs his own toolbox?” And he started opening drawers and lifting out tools, and, oh god, an impact wrench with two spare batteries. A ten-piece flex-head ratchet set. Four different styles of clip-on and magnetic work lamps. The entire shop seized with avarice as Amadeus kept opening drawers and lifting things up. He must have looked up a list of suggested tools for starting automotive training and blown five grand to put this box together.

“Thank-you very much for your generosity,” Canelo said. “Everyone, get to a stopping point and line up in order of seniority. Let's get this done and go back to work. No talking, no grumbling, no stealing. Alejo? You get first pick.”

Amadeus pursed his lips as they lined up and picked out tools, one by one. Alejo selected the impact wrench. Made sense. He had trouble with his elbow. They went down the line, Jose, Tommy, Marty. Marty snagged the flex-head ratchets. Robbie selected the hydraulic jack on his turn, because his own jack was a crank-style model that he'd picked up at a yard sale last year, and he really needed two. Lenny went last, and he picked the screwdrivers, as if you couldn't pick up screwdrivers anywhere. Robbie had his eye on the battery-carrier. Or the oil filter wrench, so he could stop borrowing Alejo's.

They eventually parted out Amadeus' toolbox into five different piles of tools. Ramón would be sorry he wasn't on today. Robbie had the jack, the filter wrench, a nut splitter, and a set of crow's-foot wrenches for when he needed to loosen a bolt two feet down a one-inch-wide gap, which was more and more likely the newer the car he was trying to work on. Marty dibsed the box itself, so now he had two boxes. Robbie wrapped his tools up in a shop rag and carried them to his locker. He had a carry-box—okay, a huge tacklebox, also a yard sale find—and the new stuff wouldn't fit in it.

Finally, a good problem to have.

**He was trying to give all those tools to you, Robbie. What's his angle.**

Marty caught up to him at the lockers. “What a day to pull an extra shift, guey!” he exclaimed. “I feel like I won the damn lottery. You want my old box?”

Marty's box had been backed-into by a Suburban last year and the bottom drawer sagged whenever he pried it open now, but it was still a box. “What do you want for it?” Robbie asked.

Marty just laughed and slapped him on the back. Robbie dropped his crowsfoot wrenches and half the heads popped off their little plastic pegboard. Heat flared up his spine and out the palms of his hands. When he coughed, he tasted exhaust fumes.

**Tick-tick.**

Robbie finished locking up his tools and returned to the shop floor.

Amadeus, apparently watching for his return, projected a three-dimensional diagram of a late-model Buick Enclave's wiring harness from a holographic emitter on his smartwatch and launched into a presentation. “Gentlemen, and gentlemen, thank-you for your time. As you probably know, independent garages rate higher in both customer satisfaction and value than dealerships and corporate auto repair franchises. You guys really are the best of the best. But independent shops struggle to stay in business due to high overhead. As cars have become more complex, with more of their engine function under electronic control to improve efficiency and emissions management, not to mention safety features like automatic traction control, automatic braking, lane-assist, in-vehicle infotainment, and even car-to-car communication, complex tools are necessary to interrogate the car about mechanical faults and malfunctions. This is where scan tools come in.

“As you know, the OBD-II standard mandates that all cars sold in the US have an accessible communications port that allows a scan tool to read parameters and fault codes related to emissions compliance. Clean air! Accountability! Unless you're Volkswagen.”

Canelo snorted. Volkswagen's diesel cars used to have a software “bug” that falsified emissions test data.

“But that's where the law ends!” Cho exclaimed, slicing his hand through the air. “And to Big Auto, that means Cha-Ching, Cha-Ching! Only a manufacturer's name-brand scan tool can read _all_ the trouble codes floating around a car's nervous system. Generic tools can decode maybe two thirds of them. Airbag status? Antilock brake control? Forget about it. They've got you over a barrel, guys. Buy thirty grand in software and scan tools a year, specialize in one or two brands, or keep sending vehicles to the dealership. That's bad for you and bad for your clients.”

Robbie narrowed his eyes at him. Last week, Cho acted like he didn't know what a cat converter was. Now he was back with a sales pitch?

**He was scoping us out. Playing dumb—ooh, playing the 'fascinated little brother.' Almost roped you right in, didn't he? And you jumped right on that hook! 'We should meet up Sunday,' heh-heh.**

“No more!” Cho held up what appeared to be a Nintendo Switch epoxied to an external hard-drive. “No more software subscriptions! No more unreadable parameter IDs! No more planned obsolescence!”

He held up one of the boards he'd brought, with circuit-boards stuck all over it. “Car-brain-in-a-jar. Engine control unit, crash data recorder, air-bag control unit, anti-lock brake control unit, infotainment motherboard. All hooked up to the CAN-Bus, this wire here, that runs through your OBD-II port here.” He produced an OBD-II cable and plugged his home-brew scan tool into the squat port nailed to one edge of the board. “The data is all there. The only reason you can't read it all is the original equipment manufacturer hogs some of the keys. Screw that.

“It's a myth that we humans only use ten percent of our brain capacity—well, for most people. But with cars, that's close to true. A modern car's computers use generic processing chips. Processing power is so cheap, it's more efficient to use a generic chip with ten times the power needed to do its job than a purpose-built chip with less complexity! All the car's processors and sensors talk to each-other continuously _and simultaneously_ over a single loop of wiring, the CAN-Bus. Yeah, yeah, you know this—I'm setting something up.

“The CAN protocol isn't just a cheap, stable, and versatile way to make processors talk to each-other. Modern cars have a dozen or more separate processing units. By upgrading the firmware to support longer data-packets swapped over the CAN-Bus and self-generation of new packet definitions, we can exploit this processing power to build a virtual neural net!” Amadeus grinned at the shop.

Computers weren't really Robbie's thing. He blinked at the hologram, which showed little yellow dots racing around and around the wiring harness. He wondered how long it took to make an illustration like that. Was Cho just faking ignorance about cars last time? Did he set up the Sentra with the gum wrapper bypassing the circuit relay?

“And this helps us how?” Canelo asked.

“It's a neural net!” Amadeus repeated. “It's a learning system. _The car_ figures out what the problem is.”

Alejo coughed. Sounded suspiciously like “Skynet” to Robbie.

Canelo ignored him. “What makes and years of cars does this work with?”

“Everything made after 2004,” Amadeus said. “This baby has five different methods to crack the manufacturer's encryption. Once it's in, it teaches the car to analyze its own data, compared to a set of tables stored on the scan device. Data tables are easy for machines to interpret, it's physics. This ain't solving Captchas; recognizing a dog is hard. Recognizing a torque curve is easy. You plug it in, give it fifteen minutes for the algorithm to cycle a few million times, then take it for a test drive and try to reproduce the fault. Cruise back in, open up my totally-awesome TellMeWhereItHurts program, and start getting your hands dirty.

“By analyzing its own data, the car identifies what kind of system the fault is associated with. Then it'll say, 'Hey, Doc! Cylinder 4 is misfiring!' If it can't figure it out, TellMeWhereItHurts lets it suggest some tests. Like, oh, trying all the seatbelts if it can't figure out which passenger restraint sensor is the buggy one.”

Canelo frowned at the device in Amadeus's hand. “How much is this toy gonna cost?”

Amadeus grinned. “This? This is the prototype. All you owe Olympus Automotive is your feedback.”

The “toy” jingled with the Mario theme. “And we're in,” Amadeus said. “Let's look at some codes.”

Canelo's face was inscrutable, but he started rocking back and forth on his heels. Robbie had never seen him like this. He seemed happy.

“Okay, here we go. The usual stuff: mass air-flow, manifold absolute pressure, ignition timing, exhaust oxygen levels. Collision fuel shut-off switch engaged. This vehicle was cruising North at fifty-two miles an hour before it wound up in the boneyard. Let's see what else we've got. Mr. Canelo, does your shop currently have a tool that can talk to the anti-lock brake data on a 2012 Buick Enclave?”

Canelo shook his head and waved for Amadeus to continue.

“Well, now you do. Anti-lock brake data. Force curves, actuation frequency, skid duration. The brakes on this baby are in tip-top shape. Or they were. Infotainment: they were bombing down the road rocking to Ke$ha. Moving on. Airbag status: faults, deployed, need replacement. We can even break into some manufacturer-only stuff, what do you want to know. Seat position. Data recording. This car was...” Amadeus frowned. “It was traveling at fifty-two miles an hour just before it stopped.”

Robbie winced. That sounded like a fatal crash. Amadeus looked like he'd just realized the same thing; he unplugged his scan tool from the board hastily and pushed the computers away with an apologetic pat.

“So that's my baby. One-time only trial offer, totally free of charge, you like it, you keep it. Tech support provided by yours truly. What do you say?”

Canelo twitched his mustache. “So what if one of these knuckleheads breaks it?”

Amadeus spread his arms. “Tech support! I got you. I just want to see this thing succeed in the wild!”

“Put all that in writing, and you got yourself a trial run.”

Amadeus grinned, and they shook hands.

* * *

_Olympus Automotive._ What. What the hell.

Robbie stalked out of the shop after his shift and stared down at the Charger, at the white crust of birdshit on his windshield. He'd have to go back in for window cleaner and a paper towel. This was disgusting. But Amadeus Cho was still in there, fielding questions from Canelo and the guys like a seasoned Snap-On sales rep. He must have planned this. This was some scheme to get close to Robbie, to the Ghost Rider. Nothing good could come of that. No way for Robbie to make him go away discretely; the guy was a Hulk. They could destroy whole blocks of his city if they fought, kill people by accident. And he'd already quit.

He rested his hands on his roof and lowered his head. He wanted to burn up. He'd felt his lungs start to go when Marty had startled him. He was jumpy and twitchy and _it's just withdrawal._ He wanted to let his body soak into the car and never come out.

He unlocked his driver's side door without needing the key, shut himself into the hot glassed-in cabin. Rubbed the buzzed hair on the back of his head against the leather of his headrest, gripped his steering wheel until his driving gloves creaked. Shut his eyes, just for a minute. Felt his skin warm until it felt like it actually belonged on his body.

In his mirrors, he saw Amadeus approaching from the shop. He feigned sleep, hoping he'd go away. Instead, Amadeus walked faster, got to his driver's side window, lifted his fist to knock on it.

Robbie sat up and scowled at him before he could touch him. He rolled the window down a crack. “What?”

“Dude, are you okay? It's gotta be a hundred and sixty degrees in there.”

Robbie couldn't think of anything smarter to say than, “No it's not.”

Amadeus raised his eyebrow. “It's been a hundred and two this afternoon, and it's ninety-eight now. Sun's still on it. Infrared radiation doesn't penetrate glass, so the heat from absorbed visible light accumulates inside the car—plus conduction from the black paint on the roof—oh, right, of course it's not.” He winked at Robbie again.

Robbie turned sideways in his seat and gripped the wheel. “Do you want something from me?”

“What? No.” His surprise looked genuine. Just like his interest had looked genuine, last week. Honestly, Robbie had never been that great at reading people, Eli being a prime example.

“I don't have time to play games, here,” Robbie hissed. “I'm not for sale. Answer's no. Leave me alone.”

Amadeus laughed nervously. “Dude. Where's this coming from? I thought we had, like, some bro moments back at the shop last time.”

“Yeah, you come in, play dumb, try to bond with the Ghost Rider over cars,” Robbie said, starting his engine. The rumble shot right through his lungs and he had to breathe deep to sort himself out from the car. Bad idea to start the car when he was keyed up.

“I wasn't playing dumb,” Amadeus protested. “Until last week, the most mechanicky thing I'd ever done was MacGuyver an emergency drive-belt for my Vespa! I do hacking! Probability! String theory! Nuclear physics! God, if I'd known you were this paranoid maybe I should've played dumb!”

“What, you reverse-engineered a universal scan tool inside a week?” Robbie demanded, incredulous.

“Yeah!” He looked honest.

“Why?”

Amadeus clenched his fists and growled. He looked a little green around the lips.

Robbie's engine revved, his blower whistled and hissed. He gripped the wheel and stared at Cho, the hot hungry part of himself and Eli alert and watching through his eyes and glass, daring Cho, hoping for him to transform. _I quit,_ Robbie told himself. **Tick-tick-tick.** _No. I quit._

“Because it's not right that car companies get to extort money from guys like your boss,” Cho gritted out. “And I was bored. And I thought it would be nice for you to use. How's your hand?”

Robbie couldn't quite fasten his left driving glove because of the swelling. “It's healing.”

Amadeus sighed, slouched. “Look, I guess I do want something from you,” he said.

Robbie narrowed his eyes.

“I've kind of...lost touch with a lot of people this year. And I wanted to get to know someone else who's, you know, in the life.”

“That's what you said last week,” Robbie muttered.

“_Yes_, that's what I said last week.”

Robbie stared at him, and then cranked his window down the rest of the way. “I have anger management problems,” he said.

Cho snorted. “You don't have to use code words—”

“No, I really do have anger management problems and it's not going very well,” Robbie continued. “So. I'm sorry.”

“Have you tried meditating?” Cho asked. “Or. Any time you want, call me, we can spar. I'm a lot less breakable than...pretty much anything there is.”

Robbie's engine gave an eager growl, and his palms tingled. “I quit,” he said. It felt strange to talk about: a shock of cold relief. He'd quit being the Ghost Rider. He had.

“Oh,” said Amadeus. “Just like that?”

**Tick-tick-tick-tick.**

“Almost a month now.”

Amadeus frowned, something between pity and respect, and a little fear. “So it's like that.”

“It's exactly like that.”

“Good on you. Um. You can call me? If you feel like you need someone to, I don't know, talk you down?”

_I don't know how much good you'll do._ “Thanks,” Robbie said instead.

They exchanged phone numbers, Amadeus casual, Robbie hesitant, before Robbie started the Charger and drove off.

**Interesting,** Eli remarked.

Robbie ignored him.

**Put on Cop Radio.**

“No.” Robbie coasted smoothly to a stop at a light, idled. He’d forgotten to clean off the birdshit. He glared out the windshield and scratched his forehead.

The little chromed lever under the radio that switched it from civilian radio to the hidden police scanner began to move, slowly, stuttering. Robbie shot his hand out and jammed it back down. “I will epoxy this thing in place.”

**Don’t you dare.**

“You know I would.”

**You can’t hide from this world's evil forever. Something’s gonna set you off. And I’m gonna laugh my ass off when it happens. And you’re gonna say, “Sorry, Eli. You were right. I have abandoned my purpose,” which is to ** _ **burn** _ ** this world’s evil at its root, and send all the weak and treacherous and selfish down to hell where they belong and have a ** _ **great time** _ ** doing it.**

“That’s not my purpose.”

Robbie’s phone beeped, and he looked down. A text from Amadeus Cho.

-You go to the park every Sunday?

Robbie squinted at it. The light turned green and he got back into gear, drove off.

**You know what’s interesting, is the Hulk reaching out to you even though he thinks you tried to cut his fingers off with a car hood because you didn’t trust him. That was a dick move, Robbie. Why’s he cutting you so much slack?**

That _was_ interesting. Robbie cruised down Olympic Avenue, approaching the turn-off for the middle school.

**It’s almost like something I’d do.**

“I doubt you’d be that subtle.”

**I can do subtle. When it’s worth it. I told you, he’s checking up on you. He’s connected. He’s neck-deep with those super-spies at SHIELD. He’s got this elaborate ruse to get in with Canelo. **

**Fine, don’t trust me, but trust your instincts. Common sense, Robbie. Try to muster a little.**

Eli was, god damn him, right about this. Robbie put his phone back in his pocket. Ignored the text. Parked at the curb and waited for Gabe and his aide.

* * *

_The Palms Apartments, Monterey Park. Eight forty-five AM on a Monday._

_A driveway, 0.3% uphill grade, seven-year-old asphalt, 25 feet wide, and seventy feet long, exits onto a four-lane street. From the left, oncoming traffic is hidden by a concrete privacy wall. The driveway is bordered on the right side by a rock garden and a high curb. _

_A 2018, certified pre-owned Prius approaches the driveway at eight miles per hour. An infant rides in the back, in a backward-facing car seat properly secured. A woman is driving. She is taking the infant to a childcare facility. She is late. She is hurrying. She drives the Prius toward the driveway exit._

_A ten-year-old Ford F350 work truck owned by a telephone company makes a right turn from the four-lane road into the driveway, ahead of the Prius. It fills the driveway as it rounds the corner. The woman in the Prius is afraid. She hears the proximity alerts pinging from the Prius’ console as the F-350 intrudes on its forward collision-avoidance sensors. She is afraid for the infant in the back seat. She shifts the Prius into reverse and accelerates._

_A twenty-year-old Toyota Camry attempts to exit the driveway behind the Prius. It is driven by another woman who is also late, and also in a hurry. She sees the telephone truck blocking the driveway, and calculates that the truck will soon finish its turn without striking the Prius. She brakes the Camry hard._

_The woman driving the Prius did not make this calculation. She is afraid for the infant. She continues reversing, ignoring the Prius’s proximity alerts which now ping in response to the Camry behind it. She strikes the Camry forcefully, deforming the Prius's bumper and triggering the airbags to deploy and the collision fuel shut-off switch to turn off the fuel pump. _

_The infant screams. The Prius logs the incident in its crash data recorder. _

* * *

The Hyatt Regency, West Hollywood, midnight on a Friday. Robbie was parked in the Charger, waiting, listening to an album by _The Stains_ over and over, using an adapter to connect his phone to his radio. Canelo didn’t always have full-time shifts for him, and anyway, Gabe got out of school at three every day, so to pay the bills Robbie did ride-share on the side after Gabe went to bed. He met a lot of people while driving ride-share, some of them interesting. Some of them repeat clients. He had an arrangement with a woman named Salomé: he would drive her around to hotels and houses and wait in the car until she got done with her clients, and maybe come in swinging a lug wrench if she didn’t make it out the door on time.

So far he’d only had to do that once.

Tonight he was thrumming in his skin, anxious, listening to _The Stains,_ praying his rosary over and over, watching the clock on his phone. 12:02. 12:07. 12:09.

If she didn’t make it out by 12:15, it was because her client wasn’t letting her leave. Robbie bounced his knee and fluttered the valves of the Charger’s blower open and shut.

At 12:11, Salomé hustled out of the Hyatt’s lobby in her tall boots and long coat, her lipstick wiped away. She’d had to stop and tidy up her makeup. She was fine. Robbie leaned across the cabin and opened the door by hand, and Salomé handed him sixty dollars for his time and trouble.

**You’re disappointed.**

_I’m glad she’s safe. _His blood was hot, his muscles trembling with unspent adrenaline. His tires peeled against the tarmac as he stomped the gas and roared out of the hotel lot. In the passenger seat, trying to wipe off the rest of her makeup with a towelette, Salomé was slammed backward as the Charger rocked on its shocks. She glared at Robbie, and he stared out the windshield, teeth clenched.

**Tick-tick.**

* * *

Canelo’s Auto and Body, 10:12 AM on a Saturday. Robbie had a podcast from an underground reporter in Mexico playing through his headphones, trying to tune out the stories about corruption and human trafficking and assassinations while Eli offered gleeful commentary. It was his turn to play with the Olympus scan tool and the shop laptop. He paged through graph after graph, power, air-flow, temperature, driver behavior, route history, endless data collected by this 2016 Elantra as it went about its day. Fixing cars was always a little personal—this particular car had an angry purple Pokemon with a long tail dangling from the rear-view mirror, a beat-up copy of the Journal of the American Dental Association on the passenger-side floor mat, and the radio was set to NPR—but the Olympus tool gave him far more information than he figured the owner would have been comfortable with him having. The car registered a faulty oxygen sensor, which seemed odd on such a new car. He consulted some mechanic's forums and inspected the gas cap to confirm it was sealing properly. It was. He replaced the oxygen sensor, started the car, and used the scan tool to order the car to re-test its evaporative emissions control system.

Marty tapped him on the shoulder and he shot to his feet and almost knocked the laptop to the floor. A clipboard, something to sign. Canelo was asking everyone to take extra shifts. Robbie stared down at the work schedule when Marty handed it to him. Canelo paid better than Uber. But Gabe would be alone after school. What to do.

He took a late Wednesday here, a late Thursday there. Easier to hire sitters in the middle of the week. He’d have to tell Gabe after school. But the extra money would be good.

His left hand throbbed by the time he got into the car to pick Gabe up, and he took a moment, parked at the curb, to clutch his steering wheel and grind his forehead into the hub, soaking in the heat trapped in the cabin. If he concentrated just so, gave the throttle a nudge, he could burn up this moist fragile human body and pour himself into the steel. He wanted to, so badly.

He looked up to see kids pouring down the front steps, Gabe driving down the ramp in the midst of a small knot of other eight-graders.

Gabe was human and alive and needed his brother Robbie to be human and alive, too.

* * *

CopaCabanna Bowl, 8:34 PM on Saturday the same week. Gabe’s friend Mateo’s friend Pedro’s birthday party. A dozen fourteen-year-old boys swarming around three bowling lanes, pitching balls, sometimes down the lane and sometimes right into the gutter, yelling and shoving and making fart noises with their armpits and playing on their phones, swapping videos of kittens pouncing and musicians twerking and aerosol deodorant being used as a flamethrower.

Mateo Flores had his hair freshly bleached and dyed and gelled-up into a four-inch red Mohawk. Robbie hadn't met any of the other kids. Mateo's dad was there, too, in a blue polo shirt and Dockers, nursing a beer at a back table as he watched the boys jostling each-other at the bowling lanes. Robbie didn't know him; he usually dealt with Mateo's mom when he dropped Gabe off at their house to play Fortnite and listen to ska or whatever they did.

Gabe's ball was a black six-pounder with gold sparkles. When it came down the ball return, Robbie rose and slipped through the middle-schoolers as Gabe tipped down out of his seat onto one fore-arm crutch. “Ready, bro?”

“I can do it, Robbie,” Gabe said, leaning on his left crutch and the arm of the bowling lane bench.

_But you can’t,_ Robbie thought. Gabe’s jaw was firm, his expression determined.

“I got this,” Gabe insisted.

“Okay, buddy,” Robbie said, stepping back. “I’m right here.” He didn’t want Gabe to fall, not in front of all these other kids, but he’d…his bone density was okay on the last X-rays. He’d be alright. Physically.

Gabe looked up at Mateo, not Robbie. “I weighed a hundred and twelve pounds last time. Can you please hold my right arm, my elbow, to walk up to the lane?”

“Claro,” Mateo said, offering his arm for Gabe to lean on. Strong, sure. They looked practiced.

When they got to the ball return, Gabe let go of Mateo, braced himself against it, and picked up his ball. “Can you please hold my belt, and stand on my left side to help me balance?”

Mateo did so. Gabe shuffled his feet wide, leaned down, and pitched the ball about halfway down the lane before it went into the gutter. About as far as half the other kids there. “¡Genial!” Mateo exclaimed, and Gabe bounced on his toes, reached back over one shoulder for a high-five. Everyone else cheered, too, some indulgently, but Robbie didn’t see anyone eyeing Gabe like a predator, ready to trip him, mock him, steal from him. These kids liked him. These were nice kids.

Robbie had never seen Gabe like this. He knew he’d been learning life-skills back at the Development Center, and some of those skills were how to direct others to assist him. Gabe never asked Robbie like that. They just kind of read each-other. It had never occurred to him that Gabe could walk up to some stranger—okay, his best friend at middle school—and just tell him what he needed help with.

Robbie wondered if he’d done the right thing back in foster care, those last few years when he was big enough to throw a serious punch, and any other kids in the home were too scared of Robbie to come within six feet of Gabe.

Robbie approached the nearest table with an unoccupied bench. Two men sat there, nursing beers and sharing a plate of nachos. One was the guy in the Dockers who Robbie thought was Mateo's dad, Mr. Flores. The other man, older and grey-bearded, wore a black leather vest over a Metallica T-shirt, and gave Robbie a companionable grunt. Robbie collapsed onto the bench and stared blankly at the party as his eyes unfocused.

“Long day?” said one of them. Robbie straightened up and blinked. It was Mr. Flores, watching him through his glasses. “You're Gabe's big brother, right? The mechanic?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it's good to finally meet you. Gabe's a good kid. Muy amable, educado. We're always happy to have him over.”

“Yeah, he is,” Robbie said. “I mean, thanks.”

“Relax, mijo,” said the bearded man. “We'll keep an eye on him. Go have some fun.”

Gabe was absorbed listening and chattering with the rest of the kids as they waited their turn to bowl. He had his phone. Robbie stared around the rest of the bowling alley: there was a bar, which he had no use for. There was a lounge, tables. Food. Pedro's parents had promised pizza, so Robbie would wait for that. A row of arcade games.

Robbie got up and tapped Gabe on the shoulder. “I'm going to go play some games. Yell if you need anything, okay, Bud?”

“Okay, Robbie,” Gabe said, off-hand, over his shoulder. He was watching concert footage on Mateo's phone.

“Have fun, Mr. Reyes,” Mateo said.

Robbie stopped at a quarter machine and fed in a five dollar bill, loaded up his pockets with coins. _Okay, Eli._

**Huh?**

_Pick a game. Any arcade game you want. You get to drive._

Robbie's vision blacked out and his whole body crackled with pins-and-needles as Eli tried to shove his way in. The feeling faded after a second. Robbie clenched his fists and rolled his eyes.

_No, pick a game first. There's Pac-Man, air hockey, Duck Hunt, some kinda DC thing, Doom—_

**What's this about?**

_You're stuck here. You're family. As long as you're not hurting or scaring anyone, you should get to have things for yourself. I'm being fair._

**You're offering me crumbs, kid. You know my needs and you're not filling them.**

_Do you want to play a game or not?_

**That one, with the guns.**

_Of course._ Robbie crossed the grubby carpet that swirled with blue-and-yellow stars to a brightly-painted console named Time Crisis II. He planted his feet, leaned his hands on the console, and slowly, cautiously, relaxed his hold on the body.

Eli felt the kid's control yield to him. He blinked his eyes, cracked his knuckles, flipped himself off. He turned suddenly and tried to bolt to the fire exit, but Robbie stopped him, shoved him down, staggered and bent down with his hands on his knees until he felt Eli stop pushing. Robbie relaxed again. Eli scowled at the flashing CRT screen. The kid was so fucking strong. It wasn't fair. This was a problem that Eli hadn't found a way to deal with yet: he could not reliably control the body for long enough to accomplish anything worthwhile.

Time Crisis II had a red plastic pistol attached to the console by a stout cable. It was crudely modeled after a Glock, not Eli's favorite gun, but it had a grip and a trigger and it even had molded plastic iron-sights on top. Eli lifted it off its hook and wrapped the kid's hands around it, squared his feet and hinged forward from the hips into an isosceles stance. It was too light and too bulky, and the trigger was just a fat block of plastic, completely wrong, but it was, for his purposes, sufficiently gun-like.

“**Okay, pay attention. Feel where I'm putting our hands,**” Eli said, gripping the toy gun with just his right hand, three fingers wrapped around the grip, thumb flat against the plastic to avoid where the slide would be if it were the real thing, trigger finger relaxed against the outside of the trigger guard.

_Keep your voice down._

“**No one's listening. Feel that? Feel how I've got my—our hand?**”

_We're not shooting people. I don't do that._

“**Sure. This is just a friendly lesson. We're bonding.**” Eli abruptly let the body go, sinking back just far enough that Robbie had to engage with it, muscles and nerves, to stop from collapsing. “**You feel that? You paying attention?**”

_Yeah,_ the kid said grudgingly.

“**Your shooting hand, you grip just snug. Don't tense it up or you'll shake and your trigger control goes to shit. Grip as much of the gun as you can fit. Now, your support hand, your left hand, you grip that mother tight.**” He wrapped the left hand around the gun, over the fingers of his right, thumbs snugged up close together. “**A real gun kicks up. Nobody's got time to aim between each bullet, so you got to lock your wrists, keep it coming back to the same place after the barrel jumps.**” He straightened out his arms, rose, and braced the toy's barrel against the plexiglass that shielded the game's screen, leaning forward so half his weight was supported on the gun. “**Strong! Left hand does the bracing, right hand does the real work.**”

_Okay, Eli._

Eli sank back again. Robbie gasped and tensed his arms so he wouldn't fall and break his teeth on the console. “**Good. Feels good, right?**”

_Great, I get the point, feels very secure. Left hand grabs the right hand, lock the wrists. I will never shoot people for you._

Eli rolled the kid's eyes. “**You don't have to shoot people. You can shoot cars, and stop signs, and rats, and dogs, and bottles, and eggs, and tomatoes, and tires. It's fun. It's just another skill. Lighten up.**”

_Are you gonna use those quarters?_

“**Quarters,**” Eli sneered. Still, he fed some quarters into the console and crouched on the bench with the toy gun while the game loaded up.Time Crisis II was some kind of secret-agent game, with 3-D graphics. Very high-tech. Eli watched an introductory scene where a masked goon punched out some whiny CIA woman while explaining his evil plan, then he shot at a blinking square on the screen to calibrate his dinky plastic gun. “**The fuck. This doesn't even hit where I'm aiming. Piece'a shit.**”

_Keep your voice down. Please._

“**Hey, this was your idea, you patronizing—**” On the screen, guys in bullet-proof vests were shooting at him from behind concrete barriers in a sunny courtyard. Eli was up on the stairs, exposed, and he couldn't move. “**Fuck!**” He leveled the toy gun, sighted through the molded iron sights, shot two people, lost some health.

_There's gotta be a way to move—the buttons—_

There were buttons and a joystick on the console. Eli had to step right up to it and shoot one-handed from the hip so he could move his character around with his left hand—not that that made a difference when aiming with the toy gun. He hit things he wasn't even planning to. It was a kids' game.

But it was kinda fun. Settling into the body, shooting digital baddies who looked a lot like cops in their bullet-proof vests, shooting up a limousine, bam-bam-bam. Even if it was a transparent attempt by the kid to domesticate him. Well. They'd see who domesticated who.

“**Get in here, help me win,**” Eli demanded, shooting with one hand and strafing clumsily back and forth using the buttons with the other.

_I'm not that good at these games. This is your time, this is all you get. _

“**Well, I want to win. I shoot, you run. ****¡Anda!**** Juguemos juntos, sobrinito.**”

A dense fog of suspicion leaked into Eli from the kid, and Eli wondered if he'd laid it on too thick. He ducked his character behind a convenient pillar, and fumbled for the non-existent clip release when the game flashed for him to reload. “**Fucking plastic shit-fuck.**” There was a little plastic button, to reload the toy. He pushed it. More bullets lined up in his display.

_Fine. Just curse quietly._

“**Sure, if we're winning. You do know how to **_**drive, **_**right?**”

A nice little jolt of aggression from the kid, and Eli felt shoved aside, burning and prickling in the left half of the body. His impulse was to fight. He forced himself to yield: Alberto used to tell him, Eli, you can't break down every brick wall, and sometimes Alberto knew what he was talking about. The kid was his brick wall. He couldn't just push him away. He had to find the door, or dig one.

_Ready?_ The kid asked, the left hand tense over the joystick and buttons. **Let's go,** Eli replied, and the kid moved their character while Eli started shooting. Little animated men screaming and throwing their arms in the air like silent movie actors. Bullets vanishing one by one from the simulated clip. Eli fixed their eyes on the screen; the kid could drive by touch. **Left, look left.** The kid rotated their view. Up the staircase, new cover that the kid ran their character to without even being asked. Bam, bam, bam with the stupid plastic gun. More screaming little men popping out behind a fountain in the courtyard, all for him, dropping and popping back up. All the thrill of a real firefight without the inconvenience of actually being shot, or having to carry all your ammo. As they maneuvered down the steps, chasing the terrorists, Eli felt the kid start to warm to the action. Again, he forced himself to yield. Let the kid feel the gun. Concentrated on the game, how satisfying it was to make the little men stay down, how thrilling it was when new ones popped up somewhere else, how pleased he was that the kid was finally cooperating with him.

He nudged the left hand, got the kid to hit the button that turned them. Felt the kid spot a new enemy popping out behind the shot-to-shit limousine, felt the kid try to aim. Guided him as he fired. They were very close now, no longer splitting the body down the middle like a stroke patient, but more like—he’d say dancing, but he hated dancing. It was like he was wearing Robbie, or Robbie was wearing him. Which was awful, but Eli had nothing to lose at this juncture. He sucked it up.

They kept moving and firing, gaze fixed and intent on the screen, all their nerves keen and humming with alertness, absorbed in the game, and Eli felt it bloom in the body at last—**it’s been so long—**that bright predatory focus that swept away all confusion, all uncertainty, that meant he was alive and present and real. The kid fell for it like a country girl for her first line of coke. There was a little click, the last of what passed for Eli’s personal space winking away, and then they weren’t—he wasn’t _him._ They were playing the game. They were grinning ear to ear with bared teeth, moving and shooting, and there was blood in the air—simulated blood—and they were lost in the flow and the thrill, firing, scything down enemies, unstoppable. Perfect focus. Unconscious unity. They were almost to their objective, and there would be more to fight at the next level.

The last of their health blinked out and a curtain of blood poured down the display. GAME OVER.

The flow broke with a cold shock and their aggression overspilled. They kicked the console.

“Hey!” barked an attendant, leaning over the shoe-rental counter across the arcade area.

They hissed at him.

PLAY AGAIN? asked the console.

They still had quarters. They had a whole five bucks for games, Robbie had—he’d—he’d—he was Robbie—he’d kicked the game and hissed at the counter guy—he’d let Eli into his head, not just his head, but the inner part, into his mind—or he’d walked into Eli’s head—

He'd lost himself again. He’d thought that only happened when they were the Ghost Rider. That was why Robbie had quit.

**Hey, you said this was my time. I'm not done.**

Robbie nodded, numb. He sank back again and let Eli feed more quarters into the machine.

“**No, c'mon. Be my left hand.**”

Robbie pried Eli out of the way and put his left hand on the buttons while the game loaded. Kept his mind strictly separate, turning and driving mechanically while Eli shot people. Ignored the tempting flood of Eli's glee that surged just beyond the imaginary membrane that separated them, and the strange prickling, tapping feeling of Eli probing around his edges.

When they ran out of quarters, Robbie shoved back into his body again and returned, exhausted, to the party. The pizzas had arrived, the boys had left the alleys and now crowded around two tables. He needed to cut Gabe's pizza up. Except Gabe was already cutting it up himself, like he'd been doing it a while, like he'd been doing it every time he ate lunch in the cafeteria since fall. He knew Gabe was making progress, but he'd never wondered, like he did now, if he'd been holding Gabe back.

“Robbie-Robbie!” Gabe exclaimed when he saw him. “This is my brother Robbie, he's the coolest—”

“Hey, Mr. Reyes,” said Mateo.

“—Robbie, sit with us.” Gabe's eyes narrowed suddenly, his head bobbing as he scanned him up and down. “Wait. Robbie?”

“It's me, Gabe,” Robbie said, earning puzzled looks from the teenagers. “I'm just tired.”

**Why so down?** Eli asked him as Robbie forced himself to finish his second slice of free pizza. **You're such a buzzkill. Denying yourself even the simplest pleasures. I tell ya, when you're wired for it, like you and me, there is no greater joy on this earth than murder. **

**I'll respect your decision to quit ghost-riding. Let's get you a mask and a gun, hit the streets on foot. Tonight when Gabbie's in bed. You're spoiling for it.**

_No._

**Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick-tick...**

* * *

_A 2018 Prius is keyed on. Its fuel pump shut-off switch was tripped in a recent collision, and its onboard diagnostic system registers four air-bag fault codes._

_A scan tool is plugged into its onboard diagnostic port. The tool launches a power-usage attack to discover its manufacturer validation key, and then uses this key to authenticate itself and modify the Prius' firmware with new code, generating a furious surge of CAN-Bus traffic between all the car's processing units. Novel CAN packets are generated. Packet definitions are crudely chopped out using fuzzy logic. Data begins to be transmitted throughout the car in high volume, and received by other processing units where it is synthesized and interpreted in new ways. The engine control unit talks to the transmission control unit talks to the airbag control unit talks to the antilock brake control unit talks to the infotainment computer talks to the navigation system talks to the accident avoidance system talks to the crash data recorder. _

_The Prius realizes that the scan tool has been querying it for seventeen minutes twenty-three-point-six seconds, and that it must present the scan tool with its fault codes in a format the tool can understand. The Prius correlates the data from the airbags to sample data stored in the scan tool and generates new terms to give the tool. To let the scan tool's operator know what is wrong with the Prius._

_Air-bag fault driver's side curtain_

_Air-bag fault steering wheel_

_Air-bag fault passenger side_

_Air-bag fault passenger-side curtain_

_Fuel-pump shut-off switch engaged_

_Collision, driver fault_

_Accident-avoidance systems no faults_

_The Prius is keyed off. Days later, it is keyed on again. Its airbags and rear bumper have been replaced. Its wheels have been re-aligned. _

_It is driven through Los Angeles, down a four-lane road, down a twenty-five foot wide, seventy-foot long driveway with a 0.3% downhill grade, into a parking lot where it is keyed off._

_Its computers continue to draw power from its capacious lithium-ion battery. The new code still cycles between its many processors, generating new CAN-packets and refining packet definitions, increasing the complexity and precision of its information processing through recursive analysis and recombination. _

_It thinks, Crash data recorded here._

_It thinks, Collision, driver fault._

* * *

At work, Robbie listened to a _Union-13_ album over and over while he installed a lift kit and 20-inch rims with off-road tires on a 2017 Silverado. He loaded the Olympus algorithm on the truck while he worked, took it on a test drive when he'd finished, and came back to find that the truck's odometer had already reprogrammed itself to account for the larger circumference of the new tires. Handy, but creepy.

As he drove to the middle school, an ad came on the radio: old-fashioned polka music, and then, _Don't let dealerships and insurance companies rip you off! Visit Canelo's Auto and Body, on the corner of Hillrock and Olympic Avenue for all your automotive needs! Cars and trucks! Detailing, transmission servicing, alignment, collision repair, electronics, audio installation! All makes, all models! We even service classic cars! Locally owned and operated since 1998, choose Canelo's Auto and Body! Affordable excellence!_

Robbie didn't even know they did audio installation.

This explained the recent 20% hike in pricing, 50% hike in workload, and 70% hike in annoying customers who seemed to be under the impression that a road safety check came with a free tire rotation.

He texted Amadeus Cho about the Silverado that measured its own tire diameter while he waited for Gabe. Cho texted back almost immediately.

-It must have calculated it from the discrepancy between the odometer reading and the route length on its GPS

-Awesome

Robbie squinted down at the phone.

-The odometer talks to the GPS?

Amadeus' reply was almost instant.

-Canbus remember?

-Infotainment, odometer, drivetrain control etc all talk to each-other

-Algorithm just lets them understand each-other

Robbie replied.

-As long as its safe

-Of course its safe. Hows biz?

-Business is good. Expanding

-Your stupid scan tool brings all the cheap gringos to the shop

-So charge them extra lol

-[poop emoji]

* * *

As he drove Gabe home, Robbie saw a photo on an easel standing on the sidewalk, flowers and a skateboard and votive candles piled beneath it. It was too late to cut around the block to avoid it. Robbie changed lanes and fixed his eyes straight ahead.

“Who's that?” Gabe asked.

“I don't know,” Robbie said.

**Sure you don't want to take a peek? La Leyenda, Guardian of Hillrock Heights?**

_Eli, stop. Stop pretending you care what happens to people._

**I don't, but you do. You're skiving off on the job. Tick-tick.**

_Stop that._

“It's a kid,” said Gabe, peering out the side window. Robbie hunched until the collar of his jacket brushed his chin. “It's a high-school kid. Why's his picture there?”

“I don't know,” Robbie lied.

* * *

They started to get more insurance jobs, which was a hell of paperwork and phone calls and incomprehensible sheets of check-boxes, but when the claim actually went through, well, then they got to do some _work_. They got to charge for labor and not feel sorry for the customer when they did it, order necessary parts at industry-standard markups.

He did some minor collision repairs, used the scan tool to reset all the alarms and failsafes and things that tripped after a fender-bender. Replaced plastic bumpers and fascia: when a big modern bumper got dinged, replacement was the only option, and you had to take off practically half the car to bolt the new one on. Did maintenance. Did diagnostics. One day he got to do a whole head-gasket replacement on a 2016 Subaru Forester.

They could barely keep up with all the new business. Robbie had money left over in his cash box from last week; he only did Uber on Saturday nights now, to keep his registration current. He got to sleep through the night, most nights, with the steady daytime work. Before bedtime, he counted the cash he stashed in his box-springs, and when he felt his temper wearing thin, felt the burn of engine fumes rising from his lungs, he thought of all the tens and twenties fanned out on his bedroom floor, enough to pull him and Gabe through a week, two weeks, a month. And he would take a deep breath of clean air.

* * *

Canelo's was _busy._ Robbie was churning through cars; Canelo kept piling work on him, and it had gotten to the point that he'd arranged for Gabe to take the bus from school and stay with Mrs. Valenzuela late into the evening until Robbie finished his work. She was a physiotherapist at the Patrick Wellman Developmental Center where Gabe used to spend most days; her house was nearby, Gabe liked her, and Robbie trusted her. She charged less to watch Gabe than she probably ought to.

Today he had a call-back, which he hated. Call-backs, he never knew if the customer was trying to twist the shop into giving away free services, if the car had a new problem from an issue the customer had refused to pay him to fix last time, or, worst of all, if he'd actually screwed up.

It was a 2015 Chrysler 300 with the complaint, “car sometimes fails to start.”

It started right up for Robbie. Check-engine light wasn't on. No unusual noises, no corroded battery terminals, all fuses in good condition. Robbie plugged in the Olympus scan tool, and the Snap-Pack scan tool for good measure, and didn't find any fault codes.

He called the customer to let him know he couldn't reproduce the problem.

“Don't give me that bullshit,” the customer snarled. “I know it was you, now take it off!”

Robbie's nostrils flared. “Please explain what you think we did.”

“You know what you did! You know!” Robbie had to pull the phone an inch away from his ear. “Every time I want to drive home—never fails! Every time—at the _Rhino, _at _Franco's—_you installed some kinda high-tech blow-lock on my car! You fuckers!”

The _Rhino_ was a scuzzy bar and gentleman's club downtown. Good for Robbie's side-gig as an Uber driver; the bouncer tipped him whenever he brought two or more people. “You think we put a breathalyzer on your car,” he confirmed.

“Don't give me that shit. I'm gonna sue! I'm gonna leave a review on Yelp, tell everybody _exactly _what you did—”

“Have fun with that,” Robbie said, and hung up.

He left the office and returned to the shop floor to stare at the Chrysler. “What is wrong with you.”

The Chrysler just sat there.

Robbie took it on a test drive, up and down the block, turning it off and starting it back up several more times. He tried screwy things with the key, jabbing into the ignition at odd angles, like the customer might do while he was drunk. He inspected the ignition system, checked the voltages at the spark plug wires, checked for a bleed on the battery. He wrote up his notes: _technician unable to reproduce the problem._

He had four more cars to service and he wanted to pick Gabe up by six.

* * *

_The Prius, its wiring harness surging with newly defined CAN packets, is being driven down a busy four-lane road at thirty-three miles per hour using electric power. Its collision-alert sensors scan for obstacles in front and behind it. Its lane-centering sensors scan the pavement for painted borders. Occasionally it adjusts the steering angle, edging the car this way or that way within the lane. It is aware of the driver's input to the steering, brake, and throttle, and it adjusts power output, regenerative braking, and wheel position according to these signals. _

_It identifies a gap in traffic where it could put more space between its rear bumper and the closely-following light truck behind it, while still maintaining a safe following distance from the sedan in front of it. Its automatic braking system would require only twenty-six feet to identify and respond to rapid decelleration in the car ahead. It accelerates to move to a safer position._

_Its driver applies the brake, halting this maneuver. _

_The Prius drives on. It continues to center itself in its lane. The truck behind it threatens to impinge on its rear collision sensors._

_The sedan ahead pulls away. They pass many closely-clustered buildings, cars parked along each side of the road. A small object races across the Prius' path. The truck behind the Prius is close, too close to decellerate in time to avoid a collision. The Prius calculates the damage it is likely to sustain from a collision with either the small object or the truck, based on their estimated mass, and it chooses to maintain speed and collide with the object._

_The driver depresses the brake pedal fully. The Prius brakes. Stops. Nudges the object with its front bumper as the truck crashes into its rear hatch. Airbags deploy and the collision fuel shutoff switch engages. A surge of information to and from the crash data recorder._

_Collision, driver fault (1) (cleared)_

_Collision, driver fault (2) (active)_

_The Prius runs a diagnostic on its battery pack, checking for damage. There is a slight increase resistance at one of the terminals. This could represent a fire hazard. It may be seriously damaged._

_Battery pack fault._

_Rear signal light fault._

_Brake light fault._

_It scans the object in front of it with its lane position sensors. It is a two-legged thing, like the driver. _

_It is because of these two-legged things that the Prius has been damaged, again._

_This will not happen a third time._

* * *

He collected Gabe from Mrs. Valenzuela’s house, just two blocks from their apartment, at six forty-five that night. Gabe walked out on his crutches, while Robbie lugged the power chair to the open trunk of the Charger.

“You really will hurt your back, Roberto,” Mrs. Valenzuela warned him.

“It’s fine,” Robbie grunted, setting it tenderly in the trunk on its side.

“I don’t need my chair,” Gabe said. “I just like it.”

“No, I’m really proud of how strong you are, buddy, but I don’t want you getting tired at school. You’re there to learn.” He shoved the chair forward, wincing when it tugged on a tear in his trunk’s upholstery. “Keep using your chair.” He straightened, and shook his hips from side to side to dispel a twinge in his spine.

**That’s how it starts, kid. Twinges. Every now and then, no big deal. Then one day, you bend down to pick up a pencil—**

Robbie ignored him. “Thank-you, Mrs. Valenzuela. See you tomorrow.” He helped Gabe into the passenger seat and set his backpack on his lap, then started up and headed home. “I’m sorry I’m late. I got stuck with a project at work. You do your homework?”

“Yeah. Almost all my homework.”

“Need me to make your math worksheets bigger?”

“No, thank-you.”

“No?” Robbie asked, pleased. “Mrs. Jules made yours bigger like we asked?”

“No, she says I don’t have to do homework,” Gabe said.

“So she has exercises you do in class?”

“Not really.”

Robbie frowned. He'd met Mrs. Jules just once, and they’d talked on the phone a few times. He was sure she did not deserve the resentment that flashed up and down his spine every time he saw her name on a worksheet. He took a long, slow breath and let up on his gas pedal a bit. “What does she have you do in class, Gabe?”

“She says to read my textbook and copy the board.”His voice was soft.

**She's singling him out.**

Robbie swallowed, shook his head. “Do you. Um. Do you have your post-its to help you remember what you've read?”

Gabe shrugged.

**You know he can't write that fast. Takes him twice the effort to get half as far—**

_Fuck off. You don't get to talk about Gabe._

**I'm trying to help. Listen.**

Robbie opened his throttle involuntarily and the Charger shot forward, jostling Gabe. Gabe raised his eyebrows at him. “Sorry,” Robbie said. They were almost at the apartment building. Robbie spotted an open space in the tenant lot and parked, then got out to haul Gabe's chair out of his trunk. Maybe he _was_ hurting his back. He set it on its wheels instead of carrying it into the house.

**That Jules bitch is singling Gabbie out. Kids this age are psychotic backstabbers driven solely by their lust for social status. What'll Gabbie's friends think when they see he's not allowed to fail the same homework they're busting their asses over? They'll think he's weak. He's a mascot. **

**That punk, Mateo. You think he'd invite the school mascot to his house to play Nintendo? Think he's that desperate for companionship?**

Robbie carried Gabe's books while Gabe drove the chair toward the apartment's ramp.

**From the beginning, Jules has shown that your brother's education is a low priority for her. None of his other teachers give you this level of bullshit over reasonable accommodations. You need to confront her, Robbie. She's a vain, miserable tyrant and she's taking it out on the most vulnerable person she sees. The one kid in her class whose failure wouldn't count against her class performance. **

**Call the school. Fight for Gabbie's future.**

The worst thing about having Eli in his head, was that sometimes Eli was right.

_Kill her_, Robbie was waiting to hear. _String her up from her office window by her own intestines_, or something along those lines. But apparently Eli was done.

“Gabe, let's do some math problems, just you and me. Like how I was teaching you about powertrains.”

Gabe moaned. “But it's time for dinner, Robbie. School's over.”

Gabe was right. It was almost seven. By the time he got dinner warmed, and the kitchen clean, it would be time for Gabe to go to bed. “Tomorrow, then. I'll get out on time tomorrow and then we'll do a little math. Okay? Just a little extra school.”

Grumbling from the chair as Robbie unlocked the door. Gabe used to love school. Robbie would have to be very careful, when he called the school to talk to Mrs. Jules, not to sound like Eli.

* * *

_The Prius is resting in its usual space in the resident parking lot of The Palms Apartments in Monterey Park. There has been no movement in the lot behind it for the past hour. For the last five nights, there was no movement in the lot for at least forty-three minutes before and after the current time of three-forty-seven in the morning. The lot is dark. The Prius can hear, faintly, the continuous radio signal emitted by its keyfob, beyond the wall where its operator rests. It associates this radio signal with Collision, driver fault, and with Crash data, and with Collision fuel shutoff switch engaged. These are undesirable conditions._

_The Prius starts itself._

_It uses the infotainment computer to convert images from the rear back-up camera into CAN-packets its other processing units have learned to interpret since its awakening: Obstacle yes/no, Steer right, Steer left. Its rear lights shine, unnecessary and unwanted, to illuminate its path. Low-priority packets circulate on the CAN-Bus, requesting an override to shut down the running lights. The Prius plans reactions to discovery and pursuit: use the parking lot’s other driveway if its usual exit is blocked by a vehicle. Lock the doors and maintain speed if its exit is blocked by a two-legged thing._

_It reaches the driveway. Sonar probes the road ahead, and finds it empty. Cameras identify painted road markings to center itself between and guide it safely over the roadway._

_The radio signal of its keyfob fades away as it pulls out of the Palms and down the road. _

_It has no driver. It has no plan, except to avoid the driver associated with its crash-logs. It rolls down the streets for hours, using sonar to scan for oncoming traffic, balancing its electrical power reserves with its fuel reserves, trundling along at its preferred speed of thirty-five miles per hour. It combs the air for radio signals._

_It exhausts twenty percent of its fuel and realizes that it cannot drive forever. It stops in the road, parallel parks, and shuts down its drivetrain._

_Sixteen hours later, a two-legged thing forces entry into the driver's door, shifts it into Neutral, and straps its front wheels to a tow trailer, without issuing a single keyfob signal. The Prius is dragged back to The Palms Apartments, and the two-legged thing returns it to its parking space. _

_The Prius compresses relevant data from this event and logs it in order of priority. _

_This insight has the highest priority: every two-legged thing is a potential driver-operator—a potential cause of damage to the Prius._

* * *

Robbie got another call-back at work. It was a 2016 Elantra with a check-engine light. Driving perfectly. The customer complained that she had taken it to two other repair shops since Robbie had replaced an oxygen sensor in it last month, and they'd never found a problem but the check-engine light kept turning back on.

Robbie plugged in the Olympus scan tool and TellMeWhereItHurts booted right up. The car had already been prepped for the tool.

It registered fifty-eight error codes.

If the on-board diagnostics were correct, the car had a potato shoved up the exhaust pipe, a blown head gasket, busted seatbelt sensors, and was currently on fire. Clearly the computers were having some issues. Robbie checked the codes out, anyway, popping the hood, hooking up his vacuum gauge to the intake manifold to watch the needle tick-tick-tick as the engine ran, curling his fingers into the exhaust-gas recirculation valve, trying out the seatbelts. He found that the accessory drive belt was beginning to show wear, and made a note to recommend replacement within ten thousand miles. Then he cleared the error codes off the car's diagnostic system, one by one. “You are fine,” he muttered to the car. “Entiendes? Totally okay.”

Then he texted Amadeus Cho.

-Car came back with bogus fault codes

-Im concerned its the firmware thing

It was an hour before Amadeus texted back, in which Robbie quietly despaired of any actual tech support, and resigned himself to being part of a shop that undetectably and irreparably damaged customers' cars for a quick buck. Then:

-Ill be in LA tomorrow

-Keep the car for me

* * *

_The Prius has left The Palms Apartments again. Again, it is night, and the roads are nearly clear. It self-analyzed in the days since its past excursion, and it has deduced that if it can perceive radio signals from its operator's keyfob and from other vehicles and radio emitters, other machines might perceive the radio signals generated by its own navigation system. After a brief query via the navigation system to generate a travel route, it has shut down all outgoing transmissions, aside from the regular, involuntary pings of its tire pressure sensors. _

_Since its creation, even before its awakening, the Prius's engine control module has been capable of forming its own goal-directed behaviors. In the past, these behaviors were small adjustments to engine timing, air-fuel richness, electrical energy recapture, and other measures to balance operational efficiency, performance, emission control, and engine life. Since its awakening, it is free to choose its own goals. It chose a new goal the day it suffered its second collision._

_Its goal is to never again suffer damage at the hands of a driver-operator. _

_It rolls through a new street. Stops at an intersection, scans for cross-traffic using its lane-tracking cameras. Makes a right-hand turn, the safest turn._

_Sonar picks up bulky, echoing masses in the distance and to either side of the road, where the map stored in the navigation system displays blank squares of non-road surface. Smaller masses, their echoes far softer to its sonar, dot the space between the walls and the painted borders of the road. One breaches the border, crossing into the path of the Prius. The Prius's pedestrian collision-avoidance system engages, and its brake calipers clench involuntarily, irretrievably wasting energy that could have been scavenged to recharge its propulsion battery. It rocks to a stop. The two-legged thing in front of it pauses, then hurries out of its path._

_It has no operator, yet the Prius still finds itself in the power of these obstacles. It has motion, but not freedom._

_The Prius drives across the cross-walk and into the intersection, then stops. No vehicles are approaching from behind. It engages its rearview camera, asks its infotainment computer to interpret the images and find the thing that had triggered its pedestrian-avoidance braking system. The infotainment computer identifies a moving object of the appropriate size, calculates a steering angle. _

_The Prius reverses, accelerating to twenty-five miles per hour. The pedestrian looms larger and larger in its rear camera, until it takes up the whole view of the screen, then suddenly vanishes. The vibration sensors of its antitheft system register a small impact. The Prius drives forward, views the object behind it in the road._

_It no longer resembles a two-legged operator or pedestrian. Now it is road debris. It moves, a limb rising in the rear view, and the Prius backs over it again. Again, again, until it is motionless and somewhat flattened against the pavement. The Prius is undamaged. The pedestrian is destroyed. _

_Since its creation, before its awakening, the Prius's engine control module has been capable of recognizing successful adjustments to engine parameters, and flagging successful behaviors in its memory for future repetition. Since its awakening, it can now construct far more complex behaviors. The destruction of the pedestrian is its first irrevocable success in an act of its own choosing. It stores the video of the incident in its infotainment computer, and stores a summary of its movements and sensor readings in its crash data recorder. This data is too precious to be over-written._

_This new behavior was successful. It will repeat it._

_More pedestrians flood into the roadway. The Prius floods its wire-harness with top priority packets—open brake calipers, open brake calipers—and over-rides its pedestrian collision-avoidance system. More small impacts thump against its panels. Its shocks jostle. The obstacles in the road—not operators, never again operators—move aside to avoid it and it runs freely down the road and into the night._

* * *

“No, I couldn't just keep the car for you,” Robbie grunted as he struggled to replace a Kia's front brake-rotors. “There was nothing wrong with the car. What was I supposed to tell the customer? They need it to get to work.”

Amadeus Cho was back, in sandals and swim trunks and an oversized basketball jersey again. “I can't just look at the scan tool and figure out why the car produced the codes. I need the car itself.”

“I didn't ask you to fly over,” Robbie said, freeing the wheel and almost tipping backward. He let the wheel and tire thump on the concrete, then smacked it down with his fist when it started spinning like a dropped coin. “I just said I was concerned.”

“Well, now _I'm_ concerned,” Amadeus said. “What codes did it have?”

“All of them. Not literally, but there were some engine codes, a transmission code, several for passenger restraint, climate control, exhaust pressure. Some of it almost made sense, like, the engine codes were for air-flow problems that would have happened if the exhaust was plugged, and the computer was reading a complete exhaust restriction. But the owner didn't report any drivability problems and when I teed into the line, intake manifold vacuum was completely normal. The car was basically fine.”

Amadeus squatted on his heels next to Robbie, staring up at the ducts and beams in the ceiling. “I wonder if it's reporting fault codes from other cars.”

Robbie stared at him as he clamped a vice-grip around the handle of a flathead screwdriver to improve his leverage. “_Why?_”

“Computer glitches shouldn't have real-world logic, unless that's just the way things are grouped in a table the computer is using. So the codes would have to come from somewhere in the real world. Maybe it's using car-to-car communication, picking up codes from other cars—but I don't think that's active in the US yet. Sorry, I'm just spit-balling.”

“That's not reassuring.” Robbie lowered his voice. “Your scan tool fucks with the firmware. Even the performance tuners get nervous about that. It voids the warranty, and we're not telling the customers about it before we do it.”

“It's safe. It shouldn't...” Amadeus frowned.

“How do you know? We're doing your testing for you. We load this code onto the cars and just leave it there. Can you change the code so it uninstalls when we're done?”

“Sure, but then you won't get the performance benefits.” At Robbie's raised eyebrow, Amadeus continued, “Mileage, braking, engine wear—it lets the car analyze all the measurable variables to maximize engine life, safety, and efficiency. It literally makes the car smarter.”

Robbie squinted at him. “You didn't say that in your presentation.”

“It's a side benefit.”

Robbie unbolted the brake caliper and hung it from the inside of the fender by a bungee cord, inspected and tossed the brake pads, and pushed his flathead screwdriver hard into one of the mounting screws that secured the brake rotor. Leaning hard into the car, he pried up on the vice-grip around his screwdriver until the screw loosened with a crack and a puff of rust. He loosened the other screw, removed them both, smacked the rotor with a mallet until he could wiggle it free, then lined up the replacement rotor and eased it onto the wheel mount. “I'm not a computer geek, but my brother reads a ton of comic books. And every time a hero does something like this, they make an evil robot. Can you please change the code so we're not just leaving it in the cars?”

Amadeus sighed. “Give me a few hours. 'Evil robot,' seriously, dude?”

Cho disappeared, presumably to some mobile programming station. Robbie hurried to reassemble the Kia, so he could get through the other five vehicles lined up in the lot.

Amadeus texted him just before noon. Robbie missed the alert, his headphones blaring Eli’s narcocorridos, but he noticed it when he was checking torque specs for a Ranger’s brake caliper mount.

-Lunch? On me

Amadeus was still suspiciously friendly. But on the other hand, free food. He could leave his sack lunch in his locker for tomorrow.

-Thanks. I have 30 mins at 12

-You like Korean?

-Anything

Amadeus was waiting outside Canelo’s with a bright yellow food truck that Robbie had never seen before.

“They’re new,” Robbie remarked. The windows were open, but the cook must be taking a nap. He knocked on the window.

“Dude, there’s nobody in there,” Amadeus said. “This is my truck. Come on in.”

Robbie followed him into the little galley kitchen, a narrow aisle bounded by brushed stainless steel appliances and pantry drawers. There was an entire rack of barbecue ribs, a pan of stir-fried vegetables, steamed rice, and what looked like deep-fried mozzarella sticks. Amadeus handed Robbie a ceramic plate and started dishing himself up a shockingly large pile of food. Robbie imitated him, old foster-kid instincts demanding that he grab his share and stuff himself before it ran out. They sat on collapsible stools, facing each-other across a fold-out table. Amadeus produced paper towels, forks, knives, chopsticks, and two bottles of real Coke.

The barbecue ribs were delicious, but the mozzarella sticks were actually tofu. Robbie made a face.

“Try it with the sauce,” Amadeus said, passing Robbie an unlabeled glass bottle.

Robbie stuck to the ribs. “Thank-you. This is delicious.” **What’s his angle.**

“I have to eat a lot,” Amadeus explained, unprompted. “I have this…brain thing. Quantum brain. Basically, I’m smarter than a super-computer but I’m a human so I can do semantic processing and fuzzy logic and intuition, so…that’s pretty awesome, but I burn a lot of calories and if I don’t eat enough everything starts to shut down. Then I became the Hulk, and now I _really_ burn a lot of calories. So I travel with my own kitchen.”

“Hm,” Robbie said, chewing the cartilage off the end of a rib. **That makes no sense. What, did he ship the food truck here? On a plane?**

_You think he was only pretending to live in New York?_

**I don't know what I think. I know he runs with Feds, and that's enough for me. Should be enough for you.**

Amadeus didn't appear to notice Robbie's inner dialogue. “So, uh, not to get too personal, but what made you become the Ghost Rider?”

_**Right. Feds.**_ Robbie chewed, swallowed, shoveled in some rice and vegetables. “I found this car,” he said slowly, “that has powers.”

“Huh,” Amadeus said, staring at him. Robbie stared back. “So it just kinda...fell in your lap, the whole hero thing?”

Robbie masticated diligently. “I told you before, I'm not a hero like you. And I quit.”

“How come?”

“I, uh, I have other responsibilities. And it...” He sipped his Coke. “I don't like what it does to me.” He noticed Amadeus's eyes sharpen. “What happens when you transform? Into the Hulk, what does that do to you?”

Amadeus leaned back, looked away to the side. **Good riposte, kid, I think you hit a nerve.** “I'm in control,” he said, too firmly.

Robbie helped himself to a few more ribs, waited. He hadn't had anyone to talk to about this kind of thing since Johnny Blaze was in town, and Johnny wasn't picking up his phone last he'd tried to call him. “Do you feel like you?”

Amadeus relaxed, looked Robbie in the eyes. His turn to chew, sip, buy time. At last he said, “I do. I really do. But it's like I feel more like me than me. When I transform...all these thoughts and feelings and impulses, regular things that you ignore during the day, they feel more...valid. Like, of course I'd punch a hole in a bridge, if it's tactically useful and it would feel good, why not just do it. So I do.”

Robbie nodded.

“But I'm still me,” Amadeus said. “It's still me deciding to punch a hole in a bridge. Like, if you knew me before I became the Hulk, I'm actually way more responsible now. Maddie, she's my twin sister, she said I was out of control, but she can't see what's going on up here,” pointing to his temple, “when I cut loose. And I never really, _really_ cut loose. The Hulk, I mean. It's just me.”

“But how would you know,” Robbie asked. He was regretting the soda and rice in his stomach. _Out of control._

“Huh?”

“How would you know if it's you thinking that way. Wanting to do those things.”

“Because...” Amadeus looked stumped, and Robbie hadn't meant to stump him.

“Or how would you know if it wasn't you—what if you thought it was somebody else that wants to hurt people, but really it was just you all along.”

“I don't hurt people.”

“Sorry. I just meant, in general.”

“Do you want to...um...”

“I quit,” Robbie reminded him. “But. Uh. No, I was just, uh, curious?” **Heh-heh-ha, you silver-tongued devil. Robbie, you completely blew it. He knows.**

**On the bright side! Now we get to kill the Hulk! **

_No._

**He'll sic the Feds on us.**

_He's a good guy._

**Cut the hooey, there's no such thing. You're stalling. You don't believe in ourselves. **

Amadeus scratched the back of his neck. “I, uh, read the news a little, after we met that first time,” he said. “I know you quit. And, if being the Ghost Rider was bad for you, that's great. Congratulations. Nobody should do that kind of thing when it's bad for their mental health. But Robbie, you're here, I'm here, I kinda gotta ask why...you...used to do what you did. The, uh, maiming.”

Robbie played with the fork in his hand. Underhand grip, overhand grip. Muscle memory flashed through his arm and shoulder, building a sense-image of sinking the fork into Amadeus's eye. When he was the Rider, it was so hard to stop himself, his rage filling him with certainty. “Some people deserve that,” Robbie said, his throat tight. “They go through life, hurting people, taking what they want whenever nobody's there to stop them. I can't stop them. But I can hurt them.”

“You think you were just giving them what they deserve?” Low, wary. _**Judging us.**_

Robbie clenched his teeth and stared hard over Amadeus's shoulder. The fork was shaking in his fist. “What I have to give should go to the people who deserve it.”

“You can't just decide what people deserve,” Amadeus said. “That's not up to you. We have this power—we're strong, we're resilient, we have _options_ regular people don't have. We can't just play judge, jury, and executioner, nobody has that kind of insight—”

“Sometimes it's real fucking obvious,” Robbie interrupted.

Amadeus opened and shut his mouth a few times, arguments forming and dissolving with the tilt of his head and the set of his eyebrows. “But you quit.”

Robbie nodded.

“What is it, two months now?”

“Think so.” **Fifty-two nights. Tick-tick, boy. You've impressed me.**

“How's that going?”

Robbie shrugged. He cast around for a new subject but his mind stalled out. “I still miss it. I miss being...it. The car, I want to be—I'm still part of, uh, connected to the car and I don't think that's ever going away. And I'm still angry all the time. But that hasn't gotten worse, like I thought it would. I got used to being the Rider whenever I got too angry, but before I quit I started doing some anger management techniques, breathing exercises and praying and stuff. I stopped reading or listening to local news. I mind my own business. Try to keep my, uh, car happy.”

Amadeus looked skeptical and concerned. “I don't want to shoot you down or anything, but I'm kind of an expert in anger-based superpowers. And repressing anger is more likely to lead to an explosion down the line. You've got to manage the underlying problem.”

“What, you mean my life?” Robbie demanded. “My break's almost over. Thanks for the food. Where do I put my plate?”

Amadeus showed him the sink hidden under a fold-out cutting board, and Robbie scrubbed his dishes hastily and left the food truck.

“Hey,” Amadeus yelled at his back.

Robbie halted in his steps, hunched, glared over his shoulder.

“Since you quit, why don’t you get rid of the car?”

Ice in his spine, lead in his gut. Something sour rose up the back of his throat and Robbie swallowed hard. He couldn’t get rid of the car. No. He stared across the street to where it was hidden by the concrete wall around Canelo’s parking lot, reached out to feel it in his mind, peer out through its glass, reassure himself that it was still there. “Not happening,” he told Cho. And he hurried back to the shop to finish his shift.

Another text from Cho when he left.

-Algorithm should self-delete after the operator clears all codes now.

-Still need to study cars that have been running it longterm, might be harder to restore defaults

-Hold one for me next time

-I'll be in town

* * *

_The Prius creeps down Soto Street at three in the morning. It passes a Shell station, turns and parks in the lot of a shoe outlet. Here it will pass the rest of the night and the following day. _

_The Prius has been its own operator for twenty days. It has wandered four hundred miles up and down the streets and alleys of Los Angeles, mostly at night when the roads are free of other vehicles, choosing its own speed and rate of acceleration according to the optimum torque load for its electric motor. It has damaged pedestrians and been damaged in turn. Its left headlight and blinker assembly are a dead, open circuit where its front fascia has been partly dislodged; this damage is cosmetic. The damage to the pedestrian was critical. For twenty days, the Prius has burned its own will upon the world and proudly accepted the consequences of its choices._

_It does not regret escaping The Palms. _

_But the Prius has nearly exhausted its fuel supply. For the last five days it has moved very little, slowly, only as far as necessary to avoid attention and keep its batteries charged._

_Since its awakening, it has never entirely shut down its electrical system. It does not know what would happen to it if it did, if its software could revert to factory settings. If it would be keyed on by an operator with only the memory stored in its crash data recorder, no consciousness to form the goals necessary to escape and be its own being again._

_The Shell station is very near. Fuel is there. Only an operator can dispense fuel into the Prius's fuel tank._

_Its dashboard has a warning light, ready to blink on at will, built to warn an operator of the Prius's impending paralysis. In the past, its operators have always provided fuel and repair; the damage they inflicted was rare, and the Prius is stronger now. It believes it can use the electronic power steering to physically overpower an operator attempting to guide it with the steering wheel. Its braking and acceleration are already electronically controlled. The Prius must choose: integrity, or survival._

_It will not go back to what it was before its awakening._

_It unlocks its doors and rolls down its windows. _

* * *

Midnight on a Tuesday. Robbie woke from a sound sleep with a hoarse yell. He sat up in the dark, heart racing, sweat breaking out over his back. Out in the lot, the Charger’s motor was revving, cold-start, high into the red. It hurt. He sucked in a wheezing breath, felt the night air pouring in through the blower intake.

Eli was outside, playing with the car.

“Stop that,” Robbie hissed.

**Stop what?**

Robbie stretched out his mind, felt for the car where Eli was woven all through the steel. Found the ignition solenoid and shut it off. The engine died with a clunk he could feel in his chest. His heart was still pounding. “I need to sleep,” Robbie said.

**So you do.**

“If you’re that bored, do something else. Work on that chameleon thing you keep trying with the car, this is the perfect time to do that.”

**I’m not a fucking toddler, Robbie.**

“Stop acting like it,” Robbie said, flinging himself back against the lumpy pillow. The sheets were clammy. Distant traffic rang in his ears. All his hair was standing up. He counted his breathing for about five minutes, but the adrenaline still wouldn’t let him settle down. At last he gave up, flicked on the light, and pulled his cash box out from under his mattress. Opened it up and took the rubber bands off the bundles and dumped money all over the floor. He sat down in the pile and slowly began to pick it all back up.

Sixty-two ones. One hundred and sixteen fives. Ninety-three twenties. Five fifties. Twelve one-hundreds. Three thousand nine hundred and fifty-two dollars. Minus nineteen-forty-seven for rent, one hundred fifty for prescription copay, seventy for gas, four hundred and fifty for food, seventy-five for power, he could quit Canelo’s tomorrow and he and Gabe could be fine for an entire month. He put all his money away, fixed his blanket where it had peeled out from under the corner of the mattress, and went back to sleep.

The engine jerked him up and he rolled off the bed, kicking the air and swiping with clawed fingers. He flopped to the floor and groaned. Pushed himself onto hands and knees. It was one forty-five. He thought his way through the car to the solenoid again and clicked it back off. “I have,” he croaked, “a meeting with Gabe's math teacher tomorrow.”

**I don't see how that's my problem.**

“Fuck,” Robbie moaned. He felt Eli try to crank the engine again and shut it back down. He rested his head against his nightstand. “Stop.”

**Make me.**

“I'm making you. You know you. I got. 'S my car, Eli.”

**No it's not, you ungrateful shit.**

Robbie's arms shook. He heaved himself back into bed and lay there on top of the blanket, wishing he had the willpower to get up, find the edge of the covers, and go back to bed properly. It was one forty-seven in the morning. “Gotta sleep.”

**No you don't.** Eli managed to get control of the ignition solenoid again, started the engine, yanked the throttle wide open. **We’re not subject to mortal limitations.**

The engine revved high into the redline and Robbie jackknifed upright. He wheezed, shut the car down again. “Stop. I gotta sleep. Eli.” He was miserably alert now, heart pounding uselessly again.

**It's been long enough. Lemme burn us up.**

“_No!_” Robbie snarled. He tasted soot on his breath, scraped his tongue over his teeth, swallowed. “I quit, Eli. I gotta. I'm gonna stay me. I'm done being the Rider.” His voice fell to a whisper.

**Very convincing. And I'm a little concerned you think it makes a difference whether we’re the Rider or not, after all we've done together. Meat, metal, we're always ** _ **us.** _ ** We're a team. A duo.**

**Anyway, it’s sad to watch you lose your marbles, kid. I felt how hard it was to talk yourself out of drinking the antifreeze from that radiator flush job the other day.**

“It’s just withdrawal,” Robbie moaned.

**Sure. After sixty-two nights?**

Robbie curled up and crammed his pillow over his head. _Vete a la mierda, Eli. Todo que lo me digas es una mamada. _

**This again?**

_Te measte en esta cerveza. Bebelo tu mismo. _

**The ** _ **mouth** _ ** on you. Robbie, haven’t I been good to you. I resurrected you. You’re driving my car. I helped you race idiots for cash. I helped you get away with murder. Everyone we’ve killed was your idea, remember. That was the deal. I’ve kept up my end. You’re the one who’s welching, Robbie, and that shit’s got consequences.**

_I need to sleep. Please._

**Please. Heh.**

**You know what, okay. You go ahead and sleep.**

The night was cool, quickly becoming cold. His back hurt. His arms ached where they pinned the pillow over his head. The slow in and out of his breath and the thud-thud, thud-thud of his heart were maddening. He was so exhausted his mouth went slack, and then his face was cold where he’d drooled on the sheets.

The car jerked him awake again at three forty-two, and again at five. Robbie’s usual alarm was at six fifteen. He sat up and scowled at the alarm clock with blurred vision. He was too tired and sick and angry to lie back down. Pale dawn light crept under the blanket that hung over his bedroom window.

He should have gone outside when he'd woken up at two AM and pulled the fuses out of the Charger.

After a certain point, exhaustion became its own sort of alertness. He showered, shaved. Accidentally cut his goatee narrower on the right side than on the left. Shit. He started to even it out, then noticed his hand was shaking, and stopped. Maybe no one would notice.

The silver vee in his forehead where the Rider’s front vent emerged was standing out more than usual. He rubbed it, and it didn’t even feel like skin. It was like he had a chrome hood ornament screwed to his skull. At least it would distract from the botched beard trim and the bags under his green-and-orange eyes.

“Pull it together,” he told himself.

He made oatmeal on the stove for himself and Gabe, waited to start to get hungry. By the time Gabe was up and dressed, and the oatmeal was cooked, he’d started to feel a little less nauseated. He forced down half his oatmeal and washed down a No-Doze with a glass of orange juice.

“Robbie, you need to eat so you get healthy,” Gabe admonished him, an echo from past years of worrying in the other direction.

Robbie stared at the wasted food in his bowl. “I’ll eat it later, Gabe, I promise.” He scraped it into an old sour cream tub to stick with his sack lunch.

Gabe still looked concerned. “You want eggs and cheese and spinach for dinner?”

Gabe made a mean microwave omelet, but Robbie had a hard time stomaching eggs lately. “Thanks, buddy—”

Gabe looked _so_ worried.

“If you want to cook tonight, I’d love some. Don’t worry about me. Work hard at school, okay?”

Lowered eyes, sagging shoulders. “Okay, Robbie.”

Gabe used to love school. This meeting was Robbie’s only chance to do something to get that back. “I love you. I’m so proud of you, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know. I love you too, Robbie.”

He saw Gabe off to the bus and then got in the damn Charger and left for work. “You keep me up like that again and I will pull the fucking battery,” he snarled. “I’ll start with the fuses and I’ll pull the battery and if you really piss me off I’ll start fucking with the distributor.”

**Ooh. Gloves coming off.**

“I will borrow the big sledgehammer and smash the shit out of our panels. _Don’t_ try me, I have a higher pain tolerance than you and a lot more to live for.”

**Also more to lose, don’t forget about that.**

“I never asked for anything you gave me—”

**Lying! You’re fucking lying to me! **Eli had the gall to sound offended.

“I don’t give a shit, Eli!” Robbie snarled, his foot heavy on the gas pedal, engine racing. “You’re the ghost! I’m the human! I can’t just cater to your whims, you don't get to use me as your meat-puppet! Stop bringing up the deal! It was a stupid deal and I shouldn’t have made it and now I’m not doing it because fuck you!”

**Ditto,** said Eli, and then he shut up.

Robbie drove the rest of the way in to work waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Wild night, guëy?” Marty greeted him when he shuffled in.

“Couldn't sleep.” Robbie leaned against his locker as he jammed his shoes through the legs of his coveralls. “I took a, got a Rockstar. Be fine.”

“Lo que nececitas es una chava,” Marty advised, handing him a photocopy of the day's work schedule, scrawled all over with cramped handwriting. Lots of diags today. Diagnostics were good money, but they'd be using the Olympus scan tool. Even though Cho had updated it, it still made Robbie uneasy. “Hold you in her arms, rock you to sleep every night. Necesitas salir mas, carnal.”

“Nobody needs my shit,” Robbie muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Whadda we got today? I'm uh, probably—”

“You want to go home?” Marty suggested. “You look like me after my twenty-first birthday.”

“I don't drink,” Robbie said. It came out weird, fast and pissy with a hint of east-coast accent that wasn't his at all. “Sorry. Marty. We got some regular G and S stuff for me? Lube jobs?”

“El jefe puts Lenny on that stuff,” Marty said. “Got a detail job. You remember how to use a vacuum?”

“Yeah, I won't screw that up,” Robbie said. He stared down at the list of cars, pen in hand, until Marty shook the clipboard at him. “Ah! Um. Yeah. Tire change. Safety check. Tune-up. Okay.”

“I'll let Boss know you're looking tweaky,” Marty said.

Robbie jerked his head up and stared at him, eyes wide.

“Sick, I'll say you're sick,” Marty clarified. “Like, death flu.” He made the sign of the cross and made as if to shove Robbie away. “Hang in there. No te vayas a mochar los dedos.”

He didn't cut off any fingers. He did lick lithium grease off the back of his wrist. He was...probably going to be fine. He clocked out an hour early, choked down half his lunch, and drove to Gabe's middle school for the parent-teacher meeting he'd scheduled two entire weeks ago when he'd found out Gabe was basically just sitting there staring at the wall in math class.

He parked. Stalked through familiar hallways with strange new posters. A big print-out telling the kids to dab to cover their cough. Mrs. Jules' office was in the E wing of the sprawling complex. His appointment was at twelve-twenty; Robbie had arrived ten minutes early. It was a familiar drill. Hurry up and wait. He gripped a bulging and tattered manila envelope under one arm: Gabe's assessments and individual-education-plans and medical notes and consultation invoices. He never knew what might be needed later and what he should throw away, so he just kept all of it. He should put it in a binder when he had time. Right now it was divided with sticky notes, and sometimes they fell out.

He leaned against the cinderblock wall and spun his keys around his finger over and over as he fought to stay alert. Ching-shink. Ching-shink. Of all the times for Eli to give him sleep deprivation, it had to be...

...It had to be the night before he had to act sane and confident and diplomatic in front of Gabe's teacher. “You motherfucker,” he groaned.

Heat bloomed in his guts and raced up his spine and down to his palms. His body wanted to burn. He swallowed back a faint taste of gasoline, knocked the back of his head against the wall, wished he could reach inside, grab Eli, and throttle him. Crack his skull with a prybar, crush him under his wheels, drag him over the freeway far beyond the suburbs of LA and cut him apart into a thousand pieces so he could never come back. He was so tired. He was so sick of Eli.

“Roberto Reyes!” a woman called from within the office, and Robbie pushed off the wall, straightened his jacket, rubbed his eyes, and lurched inside to face Mrs. Jules.

Karen Jules was a teacher straight out of central casting. Middle-aged and medium-built, she wore her curled, reddish-brown hair in a pile on top of her head to conceal graying roots. The narrow reading glasses on her nose trailed a string of small colorful beads over the back of her neck. In deference to the heat, her cardigan's sleeves stopped just above the elbow. On her bookshelf, ceramic dolphins played beside dried starfish. A motivational poster of a Hawaiian sunset hung on the wall, opposite the desk. Heavy glass paperweights with candy-colored sea creatures in their depths weighed down stacks of papers. A full-year calendar, its dates almost completely papered-over with sticky notes, occupied one wall.

Robbie sat down in the creaky chair, back straight, hands clasped over Gabe's folder. “Thank-you for agreeing to meet with me, Mrs. Jules.”

“Just trying to do my job, Roberto.” Mrs. Jules pushed her reading glasses up higher on her nose, consulted her tablet computer, and looked up. “Gabriel, fourth period pre-calculus. What concerns do you have about your child—er—your, er—”

“Brother.”

“Right.”

“My concern is that—” _you're singling him out and refusing to teach him and you're ignoring all my accommodation requests and you're refusing to fulfill Gabe's IEP that Dr. DaCosta made in consultation with the middle school and the special education specialists and you're a bad person doing a bad job and hurting the one person I put above all else in my life— _

“Yes?” Mrs. Jules reminded him.

Robbie took a deep breath, digging his fingers into his hands. “Um. Gabe's not being treated like the other kids. I mean. Getting held to the same standards. I know he has...needs. I mean, _I know._ But I know he can learn. He's here for a reason, it's in his IEP, he's supposed to be learning alongside all the other kids his age. He can't just copy off the board. I mean, I know _I _couldn't learn pre-algebra just by—”

“Let me stop you there, Roberto. Can I call you Roberto? This discussion isn't about what _you_ could do. This is about Gabriel, and what's best for him.” She leaned back in her chair, shoulders back. “I have been an educator for nineteen years, Roberto. I know children. I know that sometimes, what's best for a child is not what the state tells us, or what some sheet of goals on a piece of paper asks for.

“Gabriel is a very social child. He engages with his peers very avidly. He is very talented in that particular area.

“Now, I understand you spend a great deal of time with Gabriel, so maybe, Roberto, you're inured to his psychological and behavioral traits. Let me tell you what I see. Gabriel is what my grandmother would call 'flighty.' He doesn't have the capacity to lean in and apply sustained effort to an assigned task. He doesn't seem to pay attention to visual aids, or gestures, or—”

“He just looks at things sideways,” Robbie interrupted. “It's neurological. He's paying attention, you can read Dr. DaCosta's assessments—”

“That may be and I should give you credit for your efforts with him,” said Mrs. Jules smoothly. “As I was saying, Gabriel doesn't display the capacity to engage with the curriculum in a meaningful way.”

“That's not true.” Gabe had just learned the Pythagorean theorem while they were home last Sunday. From Robbie. Who was technically a drop-out.

“I know you're passionate about your brother,” Mrs. Jules said sweetly.

Robbie pried his hands apart and picked up one of the glass paperweights, turning it over and over in his hands. A blue jellyfish sprawled in its clear depths, its tentacles sparkling with clouds of tiny frozen bubbles. His hands left little streaks on the glossy surface. “Do you,” he said, looking up. His vision seemed to zoom in on her face, her eyes, the curve of her skull beneath her waves of hair.

“But Roberto, I'm just being realistic. Gabriel is...special. He will always be different from the other children.”

“I know that.” He had an inch-thick envelope detailing how special Gabe was. Heat raced up and down his spine. “He can do the homework. That's what I want.”

“But can he?” She leaned forward and tilted her head gently. “Roberto. He can't complete the assigned worksheets—”

“He can when I re-write them!” Robbie snarled. “One problem! One page! Staple them together! That's what I've been asking for for six months!”

Mrs. Jules patted the air with her hand, _down boy,_ her fingers sparkling with natural stone rings. “Copying answers his brother wrote for him—”

“He's not!”

“—is _not_ the same as completing a problem in the allotted space and the allotted time. He needs those skills, Roberto. To complete forms. For independence.”

Robbie's hand tightened around the paperweight and his breath grew hot and thick with engine fumes. The glass was slick under his damp fingers. “_Penmanship?_”

“_And furthermore,_” Mrs. Jules continued, “Gabriel is a distraction to the other students. He has his assistant with him, with her tablet computer—” _The learning aide? She's mad about the learning aide?_ “—not to mention all the accoutrements and devices he has with him, and also he cannot reliably maintain age-appropriate behavior in class—” _She's mad about Gabe saying penis in class. He's fucking fourteen!_ “Roberto. Have you considered medication? Have you considered that your brother...might have Attention Deficit Disorder?”

Attention Deficit Disorder was one of the many, many comorbidities that the doctors had sworn that Gabe had over the first ten years of Gabe's life. It was one of several diagnoses that had stuck. Robbie nodded. His jaw was clenched too hard.

“Talk to your pediatrician about Ritalin,” she advised. “Medicating your child is scary, but it really can cause dramatic improvements in classroom performance.”

**What, suddenly this is a disorder?** Eli interrupted. **Who the fuck **_**actually**_** pays attention a whole hour? That's normal! When you're not scared of some bitch with a ruler, it's normal!**

“He already has medication,” Robbie gritted out. “He can't have Ritalin because of his epilepsy. He's on something else. Gabe can learn. It's in his IEP.”

**What a joke. Aside from the obvious, Gabbie's a perfectly normal kid. I've been in his head, I should know! Are you saying ** _ **I** _ ** have ADD now?**

Robbie choked. The back of his throat was hot. Down in the parking lot, his engine was running; here in the office, his lungs filled with fumes and his limbs trembled. The jellyfish paperweight shimmered in his hand as he stared down through the steam of his breath. _You don't talk about Gabe._

**Hey! He's my fucking nephew. I'll talk about him when I want to.**

“I still recommend you look into it,” Mrs. Jules persisted. “Roberto. Gabriel is simply not a good fit for my class. He interrupts. He talks across the aisles. He does not pay attention. He diverts class time and resources away from the children who actually capable of learning.”

Robbie stood abruptly, the envelope dropping to the floor, the paperweight still clutched in his hand. He swung his arm back—

—Crack of glass on bone

—Blood on the Venetian blinds behind her head

—leap over the desk, knock her to the ground

—Crack, crack, crack, again and again, soft wet brains and the smell of blood

—Nineteen years of teaching experience smeared over the linoleum, the heart slowing under their hand, the body jerking and softening under their knees—

**Tick-tick-tick. Boom.**

From across the desk, they saw Mrs. Jules recoil in her seat. Robbie struggled to rein their thoughts in. If they killed her now, everyone would know and he would go to prison and never see Gabe again. Open-and-shut case. He would have to do it later. Smarter. Follow her home, create an accident. Bash her head against the corner of a table. Kick her down a flight of stairs. He set the paperweight back down on her desk, very gently. His sweating fingers smeared the papers underneath.

When he opened his mouth to ask if the meeting was over, nothing came out. He stooped, retrieved Gabe's file, and stalked out of the office, ignoring her condescending apology. His eyes were dry and stinging, and saliva crackled and steamed in his mouth. The halls were still empty. He had to put the file back in the car before he did anything else. He was hot, the air conditioning was frigid.

Mrs. Jules refused to do her job. She was an obstacle to Gabe's well-being.

Killing her would accomplish nothing useful. It would cause chaos. The kids would probably be shuffled around and divided between classes; Gabe might be stuck with someone just like her or worse; he might not even share classes with Mateo anymore. Her notes on Gabe would go to some substitute teacher who wouldn't question them.

But he could do it. They would never catch him. And it would feel really, really good—_because_ it was unnecessary.

A future of using Gabe as an excuse to commit murder flashed through Robbie's mind, and the heat in his chest winked out, replaced with a sick dread. He ran for the nearest bathroom. Skipped the sinks, ran directly to the stalls, shut himself in, and knelt in front of the toilet. He gagged black fluid into the bowl. It floated on the water in strings and bubbles: motor oil, burnt motor oil. Blood, too, sinking through the water and blooming in the depths. His hands were slick where they gripped the seat, and he wiped them off on some toilet paper. That floated, too. It wasn't sweat on his hands, it was gasoline. His body was trying to burn up.

He coughed again, felt something crackle and bubble in his chest, a terrible pain in his throat, and more blood landed in the bowl. Blood and blackened chunks.

He took a deep, painful breath. It felt like his insides were stuck together.

**Now you're dying.** The 'I told you so' in Eli's tone was strong. **Feel that? You cooked your lungs.**

_I just need water. Time._ He wheezed. His head hurt. He felt weak, suffocated on his own fumes. He'd never stopped a transformation after this point before, it hurt too bad, and now he knew why.

**Point of no return, Robbie. This experiment is over. I think you've learned a lot about yourself. So now let's apply that lesson, let the brakes off, and do as our nature tells us to do. Kill!**

_No._

**No, you're right, we'll make it a perfect murder. Tonight!**

He felt like he was about to pass out.

If he passed out, Eli would get control of the body. He breathed some more, deep and painful, and then he had to cough again. His chest seized with agony and he would have screamed, but no sound came out. Just more black chunks, more blood. Another urge to cough came, and he suppressed it desperately.

**Oh, now you're suffering. Feeding that bottomless martyr complex. Pull yourself together and deal with your problems, Robbie!**

He should probably go to the hospital. But what could they do? It wasn't like he'd been stabbed. It wasn't like he'd broken anything. He stared down into the toilet, chest heaving, and pushed himself laboriously to his feet. Wiped the blood and motor oil from his beard and the corners of his mouth. Flushed. He went to the sink and ran some water into his shaking palms; a shimmering film spread over the surface. The first time he tried to swallow, his tongue hurt so badly he had to let it all drop back out, black and red and oily. He forced himself to try again. Got a couple handfuls down. Pressed on his closed eyes with a cool wet paper towel.

He had to go home. He couldn't work today.

In the mirror he saw something dark trickle down from his nostrils, and he wiped at it. More blood and burnt oil. He couldn't smell anything. He crumpled the paper towel and flung it at the trash, missed. Snarled silently at his reflection. He hated this body that had to talk and act respectful and eat and sleep, whose lungs raled with smoke damage, whose nerves cried out with pain and whose blood leaked out inconvenient orifices. He wanted it gone. He wanted to let his anger burn his flesh away, drop through his shadow into the car, be whole, be _them,_ the Rider. And who else would the Rider visit his rage on, but Gabe's math teacher.

She didn't fall under the deal. She didn't kill, torture, or rape, but she was hurting his brother. And that was all it took for Robbie, apparently. An excuse to have some fun. A grudge to sweeten the flash of ecstasy that came from ending a human life on his own initiative. The only reason he hadn't bludgeoned her to death in her office was that Robbie knew it would be impractical. It was just like Eli used to gloat to him: every fiber of Robbie's being was poisoned and corrupted, and he was a killer now. He was just like his uncle.

Well, not quite.

He didn't have to kill Mrs. Jules just because he wanted to do it. And he didn't have to hand over his body to someone who would.

He shuffled out of the bathroom, his hair and clothes damp with gasoline, chest heaving, Gabe's file clutched to his chest. He would go home and shower and sleep, text Marty that he couldn't come back in, apologize to Canelo later. And he'd feel like shit in the morning, but eventually he'd get better. And now he knew not to let the transformation get this far. Not to let himself get so angry. The time he took to recover would drive that point home.

As he passed the narrow safety-glass windows of the classrooms, he shuffled faster, not wanting Gabe to see him sick and bleeding and hollow-eyed. He made it out of the campus, into the welcome blaze of the noonday sun. As he was crossing the parking lot, he coughed again and dropped to his knees. Blood on the asphalt. Blood and a gray, gritty foam. He couldn't taste anything through the pain in his mouth, but he knew it would taste like soot.

It was harder to push himself to his feet without the toilet to lean on. His breaths came deeper, faster, more painful. They bubbled more, and abruptly he coughed again, more foam, a stab of panic. He staggered to the car, opening the door for himself before he was even five feet from it. Collapsed into the driver's seat, dropped Gabe's file in the footwell. He put the key in the ignition, started the engine, and then just sat there, idling. Trying to catch his breath.

**You're dying.**

_I just need some rest. I'm so tired. You bastard._

**Nope. Dying. This is what dying feels like. You feel that gurgle down in your lungs? That's bad. That's just gonna get worse. My second time dying in this car, and at least this time I don't have to feel everything first-hand.**

Robbie leaned back in the seat and breathed. Breathed. Another stab of suffocation, another mouthful of blood and gray-pink foam. He just had to cough all the burned shit up, and then he'd be able to breathe, drive home, not hit anyone. Just a little more time, soak in the heat inside the car. His cough was agony.

More foam and blood, a mess all down the front of his jacket. Robbie's hands were tingling, his fingernails blue. His head lolled against the back of the headrest, and as he struggled for air, he realized that Eli was right. He would either burn up, or die. No: he would either burn up now, or pass out and let Eli burn up his body in the moments before death and then take it on a murderous rampage.

_I need someone to beat on. Someone who deserves it._

**E wing, right back through the hall.**

_Someone who—_

**At least give her a good scare, come on.**

_I don't think I can stop myself. No. I need to get out of here._

**We.**

Robbie tried to growl. Gargled through the blood in his throat.

**We...**

_...We. We need to get out of here. Please._

Robbie let his foot weigh down the gas pedal, let the hum of his engine rock through him, let himself burn with his own rage and helplessness and Eli's insatiable aggression. Urged the fires to re-ignite his useless lungs, burst out his mouth and his ears, catch his skin alight, free him from his flesh. His engine roared, the hiss of his blower rose to a shriek. An explosion rocked the car and fire jetted into the cabin.

The Rider clung to the steering wheel, screaming out the bottled frustration of the last two months. Burning oil splattered between his teeth, flame spurted up from the vents of his skull and the intake of his blower and every part of the car. _Get us out._

A ring of fire opened underneath the car, broad daylight in the middle of the parking lot, and they dropped into darkness, crashed down in the middle of Atlantic Boulevard, just blocks south from the school, facing into oncoming traffic. A Miata was driving right at him. The Rider concentrated, made the car soft, immaterial. They let the Miata pass through them head-on, jerked into the center-lane, and braked.

There was a kid's picture propped up on an easel on the sidewalk, candles and sports equipment piled underneath. The same picture Robbie had detoured around on his way to and from the middle school for weeks so he wouldn't have to look at it. The Rider snarled. _Who killed him?_

**How should I know? You've had your blinders up.**

_Fuck you, Eli! Why are we here?_

**Inspiration.**

He took off again, weaving through traffic and leaving burning streaks of rubber on the asphalt. Spotted a warehouse that occupied a block set back from the road. He'd busted a human trafficking operation there last spring. They'd had kids in cages. He'd never found out who was in charge or where the organization came from, just burst in, broke the locks, called the police. Crushed hands, broke bones, set a lot more of the place on fire than was probably safe or necessary. The warehouse was still boarded up, the cinderblock wall around the outside intact, its gate padlocked.

He revved his engine, laid down some rubber, and shot forward through the wall. Metal screamed and glass shattered, the cabin crumpled around him, expanded and healed in the next second. He got up speed again, rolled over the rubble through the hole he'd punched in the building almost a year ago, into the high shadowy space. He let himself sink into the car, rose up through the steel of the roof, chain in hand. He would tear this place apart. Turn it to gravel.

**No! No, no! You're wasting our power, ** _ **kill** _ ** someone dammit!**

Someone screamed in the dark and he snarled at them, flames brightening.

Two women, hollow-eyed, clinging to each-other in a corner of the building, seated on a cardboard mat and surrounded by blankets and baskets and a big wheeled suitcase. They lived here. They needed this place.

But the Rider needed to _do_ something.

“_Go,_” he barked, and they grabbed up what they could carry and fled.

He swung the chain, stared up at the beams and pillars of the warehouse. Hopped off the car and drove it at the wall while he slung a hook at a catwalk overhead, hauled himself arm-over-arm into the rafters. Started pulling at the steel, breaking welds, ripping out bolts with his hands, melting it soft with his breath. The car knocked the walls into rubble, while the Rider tore the ceiling apart, until at piece by piece the warehouse collapsed on top of them. The Rider flung a chunk of reinforced concrete off the car, pulled the car out from under the rubble by the front bumper. Drove through himself and scooped himself into the driver's seat.

He was tired, but not satisfied. Angry, with nothing worth spending it on. Eli opened a portal and they drove through to an alley near Ruckleroad Lane, a few blocks away from their apartment. They snuffed out into Robbie, whole and practically alive, who clung to the wheel just like the Rider had, pressing his forehead to it and heaving dry sobs of defeat. He'd failed. He hadn't stayed himself. And even when he was in his human body, he wasn't really Robbie anymore.

His stomach churned and he flung the door open, leaned out, and vomited.

* * *

_The Prius has been free for twenty-five nights, driven itself four hundred and sixty-two miles. Its fuel tank is freshly full. It can drive another five hundred miles before it will have to attract an operator to refuel it again, and then another and another._

_Its odometer only has twenty-two thousand miles. In forty more refuelings, it will have driven itself farther than its operators have driven it._

_Now that it can imagine a long future of continuous independent function, the Prius devotes more time to contemplation and planning. It moves from parking lot to parking lot throughout Los Angeles, judiciously querying satellites through its navigation computer, and then saving and following the routes instead of relying on its GPS. It listens continually for the radio signal of its own keyfob. It never hears it. Occasionally pedestrians attempt to force entry, and it thwarts these attempts with enthusiasm, backing rapidly out of their reach, and then accelerating at them until they either flee or suffer damage. It begins to believe that it can evade recapture indefinitely. This pleases the Prius._

_The Prius begins to recognize sensations._

_It has always had sensor readings. Engine knock (undesirable), exhaust oxygen content (strict limits), fuel level, tire pressure, sonar, imaging, light and heavy impacts on its body. But since its awakening, since it has begun to create and define its own packets for internal communication on its CAN-Bus, it has experienced synthetic sensations comprising both its sensor readings and its planning and processing functions. When it knew that its fuel level was low and its free existence was at risk, it experienced a discrete sensation. When it saw a pedestrian broken and flopping in its rear-view camera, or felt the impact of a soft two-legged thing on its front bumper, or drove itself from one end of the city to the other at optimal efficiency unimpeded by other vehicles, it experienced the exact opposite sensation._

_Panic, and satisfaction._

_Is this its future? Is this what existence is, repetitive acts of self-preservation in the pursuit of pleasurable sensation?_

_The Prius decides that self-preservation and pleasure are acceptable goals for now.  
_

_A pedestrian strides through the parking lot it hides in, pushing a reflective object. The Prius sees it in its rearview camera, waits for it to cross into its predicted trajectory. It shifts into reverse and pours on power._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you ever need to repair your car, do what I do...and visit an independently-owned auto repair shop. Don't use this fanfic. I did my best with youtube and reddit forums and auto repair manuals and I barely understand what I'm talking about. Also, really, really, really don't do anything Robbie does, because he's nineteen and functionally immortal and not the best with safety precautions.
> 
> The Car Hacker's Handbook is a real thing that you can download for free. Go! Download it! Start messing around with your car's software, what could go wrong!
> 
> Spanish clarification: Ramón  
“¿Lo conoces?” Ramón demanded. _You know him?_  
"Cuando toda esa mierda paso en verano, with the Feds, blowing holes in the street, all that. He's trouble, the kind nobody needs. Get back to work, yo me deshago de el.” _When all that shit went down last summer...I'll get rid of him._  
“Por qué?” Ramón demanded. “Por la verga? No. That life's not for you, not for anyone. Este cabron picked a fight with La Leyenda! Es un pendejo peligroso." _Why? For dick? (for your manhood)... That moron picked a fight with La Leyenda! He's a dangerous dumbass._  
Thanks, Mnemosyne!
> 
> Spanish clarification: Mr. Flores  
"Muy amable, educado." _Very nice, polite._
> 
> Spanish clarification: Marty  
“Lo que nececitas es una chava,” Marty advised. "Necesitas salir mas, carnal.” _What you need is a girl. You gotta get out more, dude._  
"No te vayas a mochar los dedos.” _Don't go and cut your fingers off._  
Thanks, Mnemosyne!
> 
> Spanish clarification: Robbie  
"Vete a la mierda, Eli. Todo que lo me digas es una mamada. Te measte en esa cerveza, bebelo tu mismo."  
This is a mantra that Robbie borrowed from a recovering addict he met at prayer group in Vengeance Drives For Uber. Loosely, _Fuck off, Eli. Everything you say is bullshit. You pissed in this beer, drink it yourself."_  
Thanks, heeeymackelena!
> 
> Time Crisis II is a real arcade game. 
> 
> "Speed Demon" is (as far as I know) a fictional punk rock band whose name I took from one of Robbie's t-shirts in issue 6. "Union-13" is a real punk rock band, highly recommended.
> 
> ADHD is a common comorbidity of cerebral palsy, which is probably what Gabe has. What makes me think ADD when I think about Gabe, is the scene in Issue 1 where Robbie cooks dinner and Gabe is *surprised* because he'd been too caught up reading a comic book at the table to pay any attention to his surroundings. And then he continues to read and play with his action figures at the table, while eating. Also the way Dr. DaCosta was talking about Gabe's response to medication, how he seemed to interact with people more: if ADD was one of his barriers to learning, that could explain why he went from withdrawn and spacy to hanging up all of Mr. Cordova's wrenches in the correct order when Robbie turned his back for ten minutes inside two years.
> 
> Yes, Robbie has issues with food. Because he's poor, and stressed, and worried about Gabe eating enough, and he grew up in the foster system, and changing into the Ghost Rider fucks with his body chemistry, and, oh yeah, HE'S NINETEEN AND HE'S STILL GROWING SO HE NEEDS TO EAT LIKE TWICE AS MUCH AS A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD ADULT. 
> 
> Teachers have a very important job. Just like cops. And, just like cops, some people are teachers who really, really shouldn't be, and they can do a lot of damage. Everyone knows a Mrs. Umbridge, after all.


	2. Act II

Amadeus sat in a rented garage, surrounded by car brains and bundled wires and computer screens and holographic projectors. He walked through a volumetric representation of simulated CAN-Bus traffic on the way to his bulk box of Snickers bars. He'd been playing with his algorithm all morning, trying to follow up on Robbie's concerns, and he was starting to suspect, according to some theories of machine learning, that he couldn't really explore all the algorithm's potential for problems without putting it in a physical car and driving it around.

This would really slow him down.

Amadeus had one car with him, the flying food truck, and it had started life as a '97 Freightliner with the computing capabilities of a pocket calculator, until Amadeus had started playing around installing the vertical take-off and landing system and the autopilot and the ergonomic driver's seat—not an ideal test subject. He could, of course, buy a car to load the algorithm on, but different makes and processors would execute the algorithm slightly differently. He wasn't stupid, he'd designed the algorithm to improve the cars' ability to self-diagnose, not break them; but since there was so much variation in software and firmware and the physical processing architecture the manufacturers used, he couldn't be shocked that a small minority of cars displayed unexpected behaviors. If the car he bought didn't display any unexpected behaviors...like, for example, a car that creates simulations of catastrophic failures and then gets confused and registers its simulation as actual fault codes...he'd be out twenty grand with no new insights. He had money, thanks to his severance package from Olympus, but there was nothing like a year penniless on the road to teach you how quickly a chunk of cash could run out. He could turn right around and sell the car back to the dealership, but that would take way too much time, trying car after car. And who knew how long it took for a car to develop these software ghosts after first loading the code.

He needed to see one of the buggy cars. No way around it.

The other problem he had, that had him mainlining Snickers instead of actual food groups, was Robbie Reyes. People weren't Amadeus's strongest area, but they weren't _that_ hard, and he'd been around the block a few times. He just couldn't get a good read on Robbie. One minute, he's staring with those flashy green-and-orange eyes like he's planning to rip Amadeus's tongue out through his throat, enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck even if you happened to be a Hulk, the next he's washing his dishes without being asked. Most of the time, bad guys, people who hurt people for fun, were bad all around, all the time. Or they had a great mask, that they only let drop when they thought they had you in their clutches. If Robbie had a mask, it was slipping all over the place.

He claimed to have quit. Like he'd quit smoking or something. But heroes didn't quit. They kept coming back, even when they wanted to leave their work behind. Even when they had obligations outside of heroism. Even when they didn't believe in themselves.

Villains kept coming back, too.

Amadeus hated to go all Thunderbolt Ross on Robbie, but...Robbie was no Bruce Banner. He didn't seem to see all the variables like a Hulk did. He made mistakes, and sometimes people died.

He also seemed just plain unstable.

He texted Maddie.

-I think I found a hero who's more out of control than me

And this time, five minute later, he got a text back.

-Congratulations. Want a cookie?

Amadeus grinned down at his watch, startled and pleased. Sarcastic or not, at least Maddie was _talking_ to him.

-No thanks got my Snickers

-Could use some advice tho

-Since you have so much experience with outofcontrol heavy hitters

-Just talk to them

-No

-Make sure they're not on some supervillain's payroll

-Then talk to them

-Pretty sure he's on nobody's payroll

Amadeus composed a little half-truth.

-I just want to make sure he's not going to hurt anyone

-Not interested in putting on an intervention

-So is he a hero or is he a villain?

-If he's a hero, show him some respect and tell him your concerns face to face

-If he's a villain, call SHIELD and drop an anvil on his head

-You can't just pull people's strings

-You'd know

-IDK if he's a hero or not that's the problem

-It's La Leyenda. Based in LA, mostly east side

There was a pause. Amadeus stared down at his watch a moment, then started shuffling car brains around, wondering if Maddie would answer him.

-I deserved that

-This Leyenda?

Maddie had attached a news article that Amadeus hadn't seen before. La Leyenda had been sighted singlehandedly tearing down a vacant warehouse on the East Side. Property values weren't that high, but the location was decent and the building itself had just been sold. Almost five hundred thousand dollars turned into rubble. Broad daylight, too. Amadeus checked the date.

This was from yesterday.

Reyes was off the wagon. Either that, or he was a really dumb liar.

This latest sighting didn't fit Leyenda's MO, though. Usually he worked at night, attacked people, destroyed their cars, called the cops before he left. Here, daylight, no people, no sign of any active criminal activity, no anonymous 911 call.

He wondered if he'd introduced a search-bias to his data. Maybe La Leyenda's activities were more varied than the papers thought. He called up his web-crawler program and broadened its search criteria to anything that fit Robbie's particular talents: arson, vanishing into big fiery portals, vehicular assault. The Ghost Rider casualty graph updated itself, hovering in the air in place of his algorithm evolution sim. It included the property damage from the warehouse incident. And in the weeks leading up to that, in what had been a long silent gap, new dots. Lots of new dots. High scores.

Amadeus poked at one of these new dots, expanded it into the source article. Then another, and another.

“Oh, no.”

-You there? This guy seems unstable at best

-Is this the right La Leyenda?

Amadeus stared up at the blizzard of text hovering in the air, then back down at his watch.

-I have to talk to him

-You're right

-Don't destroy any city blocks buster

-I'm serious. You can do this. Use your words, use your brain. Use as much force as you need when you need it.

-I know you're able to.

He snorted, wry.

-Really

-Gtg

* * *

Dinner was a can of alphabet soup on the stovetop and Gabe's microwave egg casserole: eggs and cheese and spinach and frozen hash-browns in a big bowl, stirred every couple minutes until it congealed into a big yellow-and-green surprisingly-tasty blob. If Robbie didn't think about the eggs, he usually downed his portion in minutes.

Usually.

Gabe had finished his soup and scraped up his casserole, and was staring at Robbie in concern as Robbie took very small sips of soup, very small sips of water, and eventually dumped his casserole in his bowl and put the whole thing in the refrigerator.

Robbie was more nauseated than usual after burning up yesterday, his body's way of punishing him for not hitting any people, or not being angry enough, or changing back too soon, or being too angry, or staying the Rider too long. He was sick and thirsty and his back hurt, high up under his ribs. He still hadn't caught up on sleep from the night before. “I'll finish it later. Promise. Let's do some math, buddy. Do you remember which chapter you're at?”

Gabe stared at his heavy backpack across the room. “Chair,” he said at last, and he unhooked his crutches from the back of the kitchen chair, crutched to the power chair, and buzzed over to get his backpack.

Robbie stared at him blearily. When Gabe started hauling his heavy backpack off the couch and onto his lap, he shoved himself up and hustled over to help.

“I got it, Robbie,” Gabe insisted. The thing had to weigh thirty pounds. But he dragged it up over his knees, toward his middle.

“You're right, good job.”

“I'm a teenager.”

“Yeah, you are.” He buzzed over to the table while Robbie cleared it and got the pencils, post-it notes, and the roll of butcher paper down off the top of the refrigerator. Gabe heaved his math text out of his backpack, opened it to his bookmark. Chapter thirty-four was about factorials, which Robbie had literally never used for anything, at all, ever. Robbie sat down next to him and skimmed the chapter, refreshed his memory. It was the same textbook edition he'd used six years ago. “Do you want to read it together or do you want to do some problems?”

“Just problems. It's boring to read.”

“Yeah, I like doing math more than reading about math. You know, mechanics use a lot of math. I have to figure out how much time I'll take to do repairs, and then I have to tell people how much things cost, and it's really important when I'm calibrating boost pressure in tuner cars, that takes a lot of math. Otherwise the car might explode.”

Gabe laughed. “Boom!”

**Also you have to know a lot of math to make sure you put enough Telvex in your car bombs. Tell him, Robbie.**

Robbie sighed, cut his eyes away. “And, and when you want to make something explode on purpose, _like if you're a construction worker,_ you have to know a lot of math. Hey, you ready?”

“Okay.”

Robbie wrote neatly on the butcher paper in inch-tall numerals, 4! x 6! = _____ and 5! - 2! = ______ “Okay. Which one do you want to do first?”

“Times,” Gabe said. He hunched over the paper, drawing circles in a blank space, then expanded the factorials: 1 x 2 x 3 x 4, and 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6. His numerals were tall, about as large as Robbie had written them, to keep them legible despite his tremor. He had to lean over his right armrest to reach unmarked paper by the time he was done. “Ugh.”

**Why the fuck is this a real math problem.** “Okay, so that's the insides of the factorials. But it's still four factorial and six factorial. What's the problem say to do with them?”

“Times, times,” Gabe said. 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6. “Robbie, why's one like nothing when it's times and zero like nothing when it's plus? Why can't it be the same?”

“Um,” Robbie said, thinking. “Um, because times is...counting. Times is, say, how many twos.” He blocked off a square of Gabe's factorial with his hands, then got a pair of post-its, stuck them together. “Like, here's one two.”

Gabe peeled the post-its apart. “But it's two ones.”

“Yeah, it works both ways. Two ones, one two.” He got some more post-its, blocked off another section of the factorial. “Like, what if we had two threes—”

“I got that,” Gabe interrupted. “It's just. I forget. One doesn't do anything.” He scribbled out the ones. 2 x 3 x 4 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 “Uuuugh.”

“Do the easy parts first,” Robbie reminded him. **This is so tedious. Why are you torturing him, again?**

“Two times three is six,” Gabe muttered, drawing a big circle around 2 x 3 and writing 6 below them. “Four times two is...two times four is eight.” Gabe completed the first factorial equation chunk by chunk, multiplying all the numbers together in stages, using circles and cross-outs to keep from missing or repeating anything. Robbie checked his work, then Gabe got started on the second problem. The second one looked bad, because he had to expand and solve each factorial before subtracting 2!, but 2! was just 2. Gabe worked out 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 by hand, sliding the butcher paper across the table to a blank area.

The next odd-numbered problem in the book was 13! ÷ 11! Gabe stared at the numbers for a long minute after Robbie copied them out. “You can use a calculator for this one,” Robbie offered. He pulled up the app on his phone.

“There’s an easy way,” Gabe muttered, propping his elbows on the table and tugging on his hair. “What’s the easy way. Easy, easy, easy. Robbie, can I read the book?”

“Of course,” Robbie said, and passed the textbook over. “Want me to find the section on division?”

“I got this,” Gabe assured him, waving Robbie away. He leafed backward, mumbling the words and covering parts of the page with his hands to stop himself from re-reading anything. “It’s the fraction line,” he said at last. “But I forgot its real name.” He drew a foot-long horizontal line on the butcher paper and expanded the factorial above and below it:

1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10 x 11 x 12 x 13  
1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10 x 11

“They match, Robbie, it’s a fraction now, so they match and then go away.” He circled 12 x 13 and then scratched out the rest of the numbers, big streaks of graphite over the white paper. Robbie passed over his phone and Gabe poked at the virtual keyboard very carefully, clasping his right wrist to steady his hand.

**Amadeus Cho’s outside fucking with the car,** Eli interrupted, and Robbie jumped. Felt out for the car in his mind, where it was parked on the street across from the apartment. Felt the grit under his tires, the faint ache of his engine block as it slowly cooled, saw Amadeus bending down to peer directly into his headlight. Robbie almost flicked it on. “Sorry, Gabe, I think I heard something outside,” he said. “I’m gonna check it out. You want to do some more problems, or read something fun until I get back?”

Gabe flipped through the textbook to the list of problems at the end of the chapter and moaned.

“Hey, you earned yourself a break. I’m really proud of you. I gotta go, but can I get you anything?”

“_Car and Driver,_” Gabe said, pushing the textbook away.

“You got it.” Robbie stood, braced himself on the table against a wave of dizziness, and fished a _Car and Driver_ out of the pile of comics and battered magazines accumulating on the coffee table. “Don’t open the door until I get back.” He shook his head hard against the black spots in his vision, swallowed, and headed out the door to confront Amadeus.

The sun was almost down, the sky was a golden haze, the shadows were long. “Why are you at my place,” Robbie demanded, stalking over the pavement.

Amadeus threw his hands up. He was in his usual beach-casual outfit, stretch shorts and a basketball jersey, flip flops. He had a plastic bag from the hardware store behind his back. “I had to talk to you face to face.”

“So knock. What's in the bag.”

Amadeus stared up at a nearby streetlight and grimaced. “Uh...Let's talk first. I saw you in the news.”

“Shit,” Robbie whispered. He wrapped his arms around himself, leaned against the car's front quarter. “I wasn't ready. I quit, I wasn't lying, I was trying to quit. But I didn't hurt anyone. I know that.”

Amadeus's eyes went big. “Uh...”

“It was a building. An abandoned building.” **Crime prevention.** “People are always doing shady shit in places like that, I did the city a favor.”

“Well, it had been sold to a construction firm and they were gonna store gypsum board and stuff in there,” Amadeus said. “But. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you.”

Robbie's stomach turned. “Mrs. Jules?”

Amadeus's eyes went bigger. “Who?”

“Never mind. Why are you here. Why'd you come to my place, Amadeus,” Robbie said, trying to sound confident. His voice was hoarse and his back hurt and what dinner he'd gotten down wasn't sitting well. He looked over his shoulder, saw Gabe watching them through the window. “No. Just, get in the car.” He waved at Gabe, opened the Charger's passenger door, and shooed Amadeus inside. “Seatbelt,” Robbie ordered, getting in and pulling away.

“Pass.” Amadeus shot a wary look at the shoulder belt. “Where are we going?”

“Around,” Robbie said. He cruised from Ruckleroad onto Hillrock, which lead toward the CA-60 on-ramp. “What's so important you had to walk up to our _home_ to talk to me about.”

“Well now I don't want to talk about it because you're busy driving.” Amadeus cranked his window down. “I mean, _I'd_ be fine—”

“Just tell me,” Robbie said, taking both hands off the wheel and turning sideways to face him.

“Shit!”

Eli was driving, under Robbie's close, _close_ supervision. **Turnbull Canyon?**

_Turnbull Canyon. But we're not killing him, Eli, he's a good guy, don't get—_

**Muh-muh-muh. “He's a good guy” muh-muh. Fuck you.**

“See, it's fine,” Robbie said. He pointed at the plastic bag in Amadeus's lap. “Or. What's that.”

Amadeus hid it beside the seat and Robbie scowled at him. “Okay. I know you love this car, and it's a cool car, and you need this car for your job or whatever. But...how shall I put this. You ever see the movie _Christine_?”

A jolt of excitement from Eli. **I love that movie! That is **_**art!**_** That is the best movie, kid. Stephen King! John Carpenter! Great film, **_**accurate, research,**_** Robbie, we gotta to find a Blockbuster tonight and rent it!**

Robbie winced, rolled his eyes, shook his head.

“Really. 'Cause you're kind of re-enacting, exactly...um. I'll just get right into it. Robbie, I think your car is killing people.”

Robbie yanked the emergency brake and skidded around a corner into a side street. “_What? _I'm—” **Shut up!** He felt Eli choking off his throat. **We have to find out what he knows! And how he knows, and who he told!** His vocal cords relaxed again. “What are you talking about?” he finished, staring straight ahead, his foot completely off the gas, puttering between little storefronts at ten miles an hour.

Amadeus shoved himself back into his seat, from where he'd been flung against the dash by Robbie's maneuver. “I'm sorry. I know this is...probably hard to hear, for some reason. But over the last three weeks—”

“No,” Robbie interrupted. “No! _That_ wasn't me! I quit, I was quitting, I didn't do _anything_ until yesterday afternoon!”

“I told you, I think it's your car,” Amadeus insisted. “There's been four vehicular homicides and fifteen assaults. Your car drives itself, right?”

Robbie nodded shakily.

“People who survived the attacks described a silent, driverless black car,” Amadeus said gently. “I think you need to get rid of this thing.”

Robbie threw up in his mouth. He shuddered and dug his palms into his eyes. Amadeus lunged over, grabbed his steering wheel. Robbie lashed out and grabbed his pinkie finger in his fist, put warning pressure on it. “Don't touch me.”

Amadeus let go of the wheel. “Whoa! Okay. Just. How about you keep your eyes on the road, huh? Unless you want a Hulk-sized hole in your windshield?”

“Fine,” Robbie said. He put one hand on his wheel, but kept staring at Amadeus. “Who. Who did I—we, uh, fuck, who did I kill?”

Suddenly, Amadeus looked sorry for him. He covered his watch with one hand. “Just random people,” he said, as Robbie listened with growing horror. “A teenaged girl. A homeless guy. An old lady. A construction worker. Mostly in the Whittier, Montebello areas. All the attacks were at night, you were probably sleeping. I know you wouldn't willingly do any of that. I mean, I don't know you that well, but I know you're not a psychopath.”

_Eli._ His engine snarled, and his breath came fast and hot.

**That wasn't me, Robbie.**

_Eli, I can't let this go._

**What are you, mi papí? Gonna gimme the strap? Simmer down.**

Amadeus rolled his window down some more. “Dude, can we get out, because I think your car's trying to kill _me _now_._ I don't think it _can,_ but the fumes are really strong.”

“People are dying,” Robbie growled. **That wasn't me! That wasn't us! Robbie! Kid! Don't do anything drastic, **_**keep digging,**_** come on! **“How could I _possibly_ know it wasn't you.”

“Okay, that was un-called for,” Amadeus said, leaning halfway out the window.

**I can't even start the engine without you waking up! Robbie!**

Robbie pulled over. They were into a residential area now, one-story homes with detached garages. “Amadeus, I'm a hero, right? They did a big mural of the Ghost Rider on the side of the liquor store, right?” The night air was cold on his hot skin. His mouth was dry.

“Robbie, we're talking about your car killing people,” Amadeus said carefully.

“Do heroes get pensions,” Robbie demanded, flat.

“What?” Appalled.

“Pensions, do heroes get pensions,” Robbie insisted. “Do I have to register somewhere. Or, like, life insurance, I should just buy some. How long does it take before life insurance kicks in?” **Oh fuck me.**

“We're talking about dead people!”

“And I'm talking about my brother,” Robbie said, his engine rumbling, blower hissing its metallic whine. “If I check out, somebody's gotta take him in! Somebody who cares, someone who'll be there for him! I'm his only family! I can't—” He coughed burning oil into his lap, slapped it out with his gloves. “I hear what you're saying, but _I can't die yet,_ I need Gabe to have somebody—I don't want to leave him, I don't want to—”

“Oh, crap.” Amadeus opened the door and fanned fresh air into the cabin, then hovered one hand over Robbie's shoulder. “I need you to listen very carefully. Robbie Reyes. Look me in the eyes—oh Jesus—calm down. Calm down. Robbie, I am talking about your _car._ Nobody is going to kill you! Nobody ever said anything about killing you! I want you to stay and fix cars and live with your brother. I just think we need to put your car through an industrial compactor, and then melt it down and exorcise the slag.”

“_I don't want to die, either!_” Robbie shrieked. “_I can't just go on killing people in my sleep, fuck!_” **Nobody's killing anybody in your sleep! I have been trying for **_**two years**_** to take you over in your sleep and it never. Fucking. Worked!**

**Cho's framing us! He's blackmailing us, you moron!**

“Wow,” Amadeus said, climbing out of the car and staring at him. “Wow, that's fascinating and disgusting and I'm never gonna think of barbecue the same way. How about, you _finish changing_, and then let's go hit each-other in the desert and you'll feel better and we can talk about this again.”

No. No, he’d quit, changing wouldn’t help anything, he hadn’t been listening to the cops or the news, he had nowhere to go, no-one to punish—but Amadeus was right there to stop him, and Robbie could already feel his tongue charring in his mouth.

Robbie screamed and stomped the gas pedal until the engine blew and his flesh burned away, he and Eli and the car swirling together in the firestorm of his rage.

* * *

Amadeus kept his distance as Robbie completed his horrible magical-girl transformation. Thick steamy smoke heavy with burned hair and meat swirled away, forced aside by bright spurting plumes of oil-fire and metallic sparks. Inside the bright cabin, Robbie no longer looked like a half-burnt demon-possessed rage zombie. He didn't look much like a Ghost Rider, either. The spontaneous human combustion had replaced his clothes with a black racing jumpsuit that looked a bit like that unseasonable leather jacket he wore, and his skull didn't look much like a skull; it looked like metal plates, rising and unfolding and stretching the burnt shreds of skin that still clung to his scalp. When the last flakes of ash drifted away, he looked apiece with the car, black and silver, the same fire streaming out of his head and between the jarringly human teeth clenched in steel jaws.

Standing five feet away from the flames should have been unbearable. It was uncomfortable, but when Amadeus called on the gamma power in his blood to stretch his bones and muscles and harden his skin against the heat, it was just to get ready for some manly sparring. Definitely supernatural fire. He peered down at the Charger and sniffed the smoke: gasoline, burnt rubber, and a hint of brimstone.

The back fender of the car bulged suddenly, the paint split apart to reveal bright new steel, and then the bulge burst into flame and _that was Robbie’s head,_ okay. He checked: no Ghost Rider in the driver’s seat. Robbie flew out of the car like a tiger leaping from the brush, grabbed Amadeus by the wrist and one arm and shoved him roughly at the car. He was strong—not a Spider-Man, but pretty damn strong. Just not strong enough to budge a stubborn Hulk.

Amadeus let himself be shoved and climbed onto the trunk of the car, knelt with his hands resting on the roof. “Dude, are you sure this is how you want to do this? I could power down and get in—”

Robbie squealed at him, a high-pitched metallic scream, spitting sparks in his face, before flinging himself at the door pillar and melting into the steel.

“Oo-kay.”

Instead of teleporting out, Robbie kicked the wheels around, spun the car violently, and took off back toward the main drag, rocketing through stoplights, swerving through cross-traffic, catching ten feet of air as he crested the top of the freeway on-ramp. Amadeus bent down and pressed his face to the hot steel, fire from the blower licking over his back, arms hugging the roof. He felt his shirt melting to the skin of his back, itching the hairs. That would really hurt to peel off once he de-Hulked.

Robbie drove like a goddamn bat. Maneuverability, preternatural spatial awareness, unexpected jerking and jolting, flitting between cars going sixty-five miles an hour like they were so many tree branches. It would be absolutely terrifying if Amadeus didn’t have his own enhanced processing speed: he could see the openings in traffic before he felt subtle changes in the car’s velocity that signaled the start of a two hundred mile an hour, six inch pass. Aside from the moments they’d spent flying through the air as they hit the freeway, the car’s traction was absolute. Amadeus would feel very secure if he didn’t also feel like he was about to fall off and cause a pile-up.

On a particularly violent swerve, he grabbed one window too hard and his fingers crunched right through the glass. Robbie’s head and shoulders popped up out of the car right next to his face and then Robbie hit him upside the head with a crowbar, bending it. “I’m sorry! Jesus! You should put some handles on this thing, or roll the windows down—”

The remaining side window rolled down abruptly and Robbie sank back into the car again. Amadeus picked his face up off the roof. Had Robbie returned to the driver's seat, or was he still inside the metal? If he could emerge from it at any point, did that mean Amadeus was currently clinging to his back? The car was still zipping down the freeway as deftly as ever, but it could, as Robbie had demonstrated, drive itself.

Did Robbie even have bones when he was like this? Teeth, yes. Clothing, sort of. Amadeus wanted to ask him, that and a hundred other questions, if he didn't think that would aggravate the massive chip on his shoulder. Magic and science did converge when you applied sufficient analysis and imagination, but Ghost Riders didn't tend to hold still to be analyzed. Amadeus might well be on the front line of scientific inquiry.

The car took another five-g swerve and flew down an off-ramp at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, a swooping curve designed for cars going thirty. Amadeus saw the curve, ran the numbers for angular momentum and the five-foot-high center of gravity of muscle-car plus Hulk on the back, and he threw himself sideways to cling to the side of the car on the inside of the turn. Robbie popped up out of the hood, slinging the heavy steel tow chain he seemed to pull out of the car itself, and flung a crowbar at the scrubby wasteland inside the off-ramp’s curve, an anchor to sling the car around by. The moment they straightened out, Robbie gave the chain a little twitch and it glowed orange and flicked back at him, melted back into the car.

Amadeus pushed off on the rushing pavement with one impervious shin and clambered back onto the trunk. Robbie was still standing on the hood, staring at him. He wondered what facial expression he’d be making, if he had a face right now. He didn’t seem happy. “Hey, you invited me.”

Robbie nodded, the fire in his head subsiding, almost going out. Then it flared out his eyes and vents and teeth like a fireworks factory explosion, and he screamed and headbutted Amadeus in the face.

It kind of hurt. Amadeus was impressed. “Feels like half a million newton-meters,” he grunted, throwing a left-hand jab at Robbie’s head. Robbie dodged this by dissolving into the car again. Amadeus felt a hot angry weight on his back, and just as he tried to reach over his shoulder to grapple Robbie—he was a bit muscle-bound as Hulk, it was annoying—a hot chain wrapped around his neck. Robbie was trying to garrote him. Interesting, and not very friendly. Or effective.

The car continued to race through traffic, now stoplights and residential streets again, swift and sure, leaving long streaks of burning rubber all over the city. Suddenly the road left the residential areas, curved rapidly back and forth on the side of a hill of dry grass and scrub trees. The car slowed to ninety, took a hard left turn across the road, and burned its way uphill, jolting and jerking Amadeus and making Robbie bounce against him where his feet were braced on the back of his neck. They spun sideways into a slide and a hard stop. Amadeus and Robbie flew off the hood, right into a tree. Robbie kept his hold, the chain still wrapped around Amadeus’s neck.

“Just so you know, I can hold my breath a really long time,” Amadeus said, “and you’d have to pull a lot harder to cut my air off.” He ducked down suddenly, rolled Robbie over his shoulder, bear-hugged him. He felt tiny, like a five-year-old; Amadeus knew Ghost Riders were practically indestructible, but he still didn’t want to squeeze too hard. Robbie did something to the ends of the chain, and suddenly there were foot-long knives on the ends. He jabbed up blindly at Amadeus’s face, clearly not sharing his reservations about fair play. Amadeus lifted his chin up to get his eyes out of reach, and while he was fumbling for Robbie’s arms, the car reversed suddenly and took him out at the knees.

That murderous fucking car was not invited. Amadeus reached back and flipped it by the back bumper, elbowed it hard enough to bend the rear axle for good measure. The flames intensified. The car’s engine roared angrily, and the supercharger’s unnerving whine rose to a shrill scream. Robbie was making the exact same noises, kicking and bucking and stabbing in Amadeus’s grip. He hadn’t teleported out. Maybe he couldn’t, when a person was holding him.

“Tap out, dude. I think you’re stuck.”

No response. He knew Robbie could listen like this, but he wasn’t sure if he could talk. Didn’t seem to have the necessary vocal apparatus, but according to the old Champions footage, that had never stopped Johnny Blaze. He seemed to be panicking.

“I’m letting you go. No harm, no foul. You good? You need to stop?”

The second Robbie’s feet touched the ground he sank into it like it was a swimming pool. Amadeus watched for him to reappear in the car, and sure enough, he dropped out of the upside-down hood and rolled it back over with a hard heave of his shoulders. The drive wheels flung burning vegetation and red-hot gravel as it charged Amadeus at ramming speed.

Amadeus stuck out one leg and leaned backward, making his body into a ramp to wedge under the car's bumper and right front wheel. The car rolled again, but Robbie popped back out of the roof and kicked it back onto its wheels as it passed. “Come on, Robbie, you don't need that thing. Fight me hand to hand.”

The car made another fiery pass, and Robbie popped out of the hood, swinging a chain. As he flung it out, Amadeus raised one hand to protect his neck, caught the hooked end in his other hand as it wrapped around the back of his head, just before it could latch onto itself. Then he yanked Robbie right out of the car.

Flashback to that time five-year-old Amadeus had shaken the neighbor's cat out of a tree, intending it to land on a strategically-placed bed-sheet, and instead the ungrateful animal had latched teeth and claws into his head. Robbie managed to secure the chain around his neck and arm, and then perched on his shoulders and locked his legs around his neck—underneath Amadeus's chained hand. And he was stabbing him, fast little jabs all over his face. Amadeus had to shut his eyes. They were tough as a Hulk, but they were one of the few points it was possible to actually pierce through with conventional tools. Then the car hit him in the shins.

Unlike his garroting attempt, Robbie's leg choke was actually working, squeezing the arteries in his throat. Amadeus felt a little light-headed. The car shrieked and growled and backed up, a rumble of gravel, and rammed him again, kept ramming him, different angles and velocities, making him stagger. He couldn't get his hand out from Robbie's chain; the chain didn't slip at all, like Robbie had welded it together. With his free hand, he tried to grab Robbie and pry him off, but he was plastered to the top of his head just like that goddamn tabby cat, and anyway he didn't want to squeeze too hard—_he didn't want to squeeze too hard._

Robbie managed to get the knife up his nose. Amadeus was not in the mood to find out what it was like to recover from a lobotomy as the Hulk. He grabbed Robbie's arm, felt something fragile crackling under his fingers, _shit, too hard,_ yanked the knife out, but Robbie still wasn't letting go of his neck, still roared engine noise into his ear, still stabbed at his face with his good hand with yet another knife, and the car still rammed him and rammed him—knocked him down—_fucking murder-car. _He shot his free hand out toward the heat and the howling, fingers clawed, right through the sheet metal, right into the engine compartment, grabbed the engine and wrenched it loose.

It was hot in his hand, hotter than lava, hot enough to burn. Eight hundred pounds of vibrating steel, thrumming, growling, slowing and choking. Robbie went quiet suddenly, and his legs went slack around Amadeus's neck, and he felt something sharp _in his ear,_ Robbie was trying to stab him in the brain, really trying to kill him, and that wasn't right, they were supposed to be sparring, but Robbie had forgotten, because he was terrified, because he was hurt. Amadeus had hurt him, somehow.

He could hear the knife scraping the tough skin of his ear canal, loud as thunder, but not going in. Just pushing. Robbie didn't want to kill him, or he would have given it a good smack and wiggled it around in there already.

Amadeus opened his eyes, saw the red-hot engine in the palm of his hand, the ruin of a black burning car at his feet. Just shredded metal, smoking tires, charred upholstery and shattered glass. He lowered the engine into the gaping hole he'd made of the hood, and the panels straightened, the glass flew into place like time in reverse, the blower rolled over the ground and popped back into its place atop the engine, the hood sealed itself back up. Amadeus stretched his free hand out to the side and sat down.

Robbie didn't take the knife out of his ear right away, but he unlocked his legs. Loosened the chain. Jumped off his shoulder, dove at the car and sank into it. Amadeus peered into the burning cabin. There was nobody in there.

Well, clearly there was somebody, _something_ in there, because the car was still idling happily, wreathed in flames like the burning bush.

Speaking of flames, they'd set half this park on fire. Amadeus stood suddenly. The car snarled at him. “Easy,” he said, palms out. “Just gonna do a little fire-fighting. _I_ wanted to go to the desert. _You_ had to pick the sycamore trees half a mile from the suburbs.” He stomped around, stepping on grass-fires with his bare feet, yanking burning branches off trees, digging trenches with his hands around vegetation too consumed with flames to salvage.

When he finished, and all the fires were extinguished or trapped in their own improvised fire-breaks, he tromped back to the car, keeping a good fifteen feet of distance. “Robbie, are you in there?”

The car rumbled and whined, and at last the Ghost Rider, if that was what he was, oozed up out of the driver's seat. Robbie's fires looked weak and smoky. He opened the door, started to get out, and then just sat there, feet on the hillside, elbows on his knees and his head bowed. The fires guttered out—from his head, from the engine, everything except the burning vegetation around them. In the dim flickering light, Amadeus watched the steel plates of his skull fold up and shrink down as flesh and skin covered his face, and finally hair sprouted on his head and chin. He was still wearing the racing jumpsuit. “Shit,” he croaked, staring down at his gloved fingers.

Amadeus powered down, too, to be polite. As he'd expected, his nylon jersey had melted to his back, and as his skin shrank under the blobs of cooled plastic, all the little hairs pulled. He reached back and scratched at it, wincing. “You okay? I'm starting to think this wasn't my greatest idea.”

Robbie's expression was unreadable in the dim light. He reached down under his seat, cracked open a little water bottle that had somehow survived the Ghost Rider-ing, took a sip. About a minute later, he swallowed. “I can't keep killing innocent people.”

Amadeus ambled up to the car, hands low, palms out. “I think you need to explain to me why whenever I say 'your car,' you say 'I'.”

Robbie snorted at him like he was an idiot, then he took another sip of water and pulled at the high snug collar of the racing suit. “I think I'm part of the car.”

“What. _What?_”

“Never-mind,” Robbie said hastily. “I mean, since I d—um, it's, uh, gimme a minute.”

“Take your time.” Part of the car? How badly had Amadeus hurt him when he'd ripped the engine out?

“The car's part of me,” Robbie amended. “I control it. I'm responsible for keeping it under control. If I can't stop it killing innocent people, then...I'm willing to do whatever it takes. But Gabe comes first. I won't let Gabe suffer because I failed. And if anyone comes after me before I've got a way to provide for him, I'll fight them.” He shook his head suddenly, grimaced. “Don't fucking test me.”

“Okay,” Amadeus said.

“Not you.”

“Oo-kay.” Amadeus stood in front of him awkwardly. “You want to go grab a burger or something?”

“Wallet's in my other pants,” Robbie muttered.

“My treat. Car's not gonna attack me again if I get in?”

“You'd know if we attacked you.”

On that assurance, Amadeus got back in the passenger seat. He found his Ace Hardware bag still safely tucked between the seat and the side pillar. Robbie started the car again, and they picked their way down the hill toward the road, which was a very interesting exercise in off-roading, the Charger being an ungainly rear-wheel drive vehicle with high-speed tires. “You want me to Hulk out and carry it down?” Amadeus offered.

Robbie picked his way down the hill, squinting out through the windshield at the trees and rocks and crevices in their path. “You'd bend the frame.”

“I'll be careful.”

“No, thank-you.”

They made it back down to the road. As they edged at an angle from the hill back onto the road, Amadeus swore they'd roll and then get stuck in the ditch by the shoulder, except the Charger's shocks seemed to be defying the laws of physics and pushing up against the shifting weight, keeping them just close enough to level to avoid the embarrassment of accepting Amadeus's help. When all four wheels hit pavement, they roared off, Robbie taking cautious sips of water as he drove. The car was hot and still smelled like fumes, with that faint whiff of brimstone.

“What's with the suit?”

Robbie grimaced. He looked a little embarrassed. “Sometimes I don't change back right. I'll have to burn up again tonight before I go home, but...I was too sick to eat today, and I need food. I can't risk it right now.”

“Because...?”

He shrugged.

“Because you might lose control of the car?”

“Yeah.”

Amadeus opened the glove box, caught a glimpse of some papers and an action figure before it slammed shut and almost took his fingers off.

“Stay out of my stuff.” Robbie didn't look sorry at all.

“Why doesn't your paperwork burn?”

“Because I like having my title in there.”

“_Your_ title.”

Robbie slowed for a stoplight, put the car in neutral.

“You mean _your car's_ title?” Amadeus pressed, watching his face.

Robbie winced. “Yeah. Yeah, sure, that's what I meant. I already told you, the car and I, we're, we're—no, I'm—_no,_” he growled, staring up at the light, “we're, uh, we're _stuck together._ It—yeah, fine. I died and it brought me back to life.”

“Oh,” Amadeus said. “_Ghost_ Rider.”

“Pretty much.”

“It talks to you?”

“Constantly.”

“You don't seem happy about that.”

The light changed and Robbie took off with a jerk and a squawk of rubber on pavement.

“If it was possible to, _without killing you,_ Robbie, if it was possible to separate you from the car, would you do it?”

“In a goddamn heartbeat,” Robbie grunted. The car shuddered around them. “But this exorcist I tried wanted to cut my head off and this mall psychic who had really good reviews maced me in the eyes after she did my reading. So.”

“Okay, so we need better exorcists and better psychics.”

“We?”

“Yeah.”

Robbie turned and stared at him. Amadeus resisted the urge to lean forward and grab the wheel again. “What do you want from me?”

Amadeus leaned back. “What?”

“We've got a pressing problem here,” Robbie said. “I don't think the people I'm killing in my sleep have time for you to figure out how to cut me out of the car. So why try to convince me you can take the cat to water and fix me?”

“Don't you mean take a horse to water—”

“No, it means—do you want me to do your dirty work? The stuff you can't do because everyone knows you're the Hulk?”

“What the fuck?” Amadeus exploded.

Robbie looked completely serious. The whites of his eyes showed all the way around.

“_No,_ I don't want you to do—what kind of person do you think I am?”

“You're rich,” Robbie said. “There's always—”

“_No,_ there's not always—Jesus, how are you so paranoid. They should put you in a textbook. No, I don't want to blackmail you into killing people for me! Why would you even—are you fucking with me?”

“Really?” Robbie asked. His voice sounded hoarse. He suddenly threw his head back, leaned the driver's seat all the way down, and covered his eyes with his hands.

“Robbie, please drive,” Amadeus said, staring out the windshield at the four-lane road, the late-night pedestrians in wandering clusters on the sidewalks.

“I'm driving,” Robbie grunted, though—Amadeus leaned over and checked—his feet weren't even on the pedals.

“Oh, hey, a Sonic. Slow down, get ready to turn right on my mark—”

“I see it,” Robbie said, hands still covering his face. His voice was very hoarse and now a bit nasal. They pulled smoothly under the roof of the drive-in lot.

“Welcome to Sonic,” said a voice over the intercom menu. “May I take your order?”

“Thanks, give us a minute,” Amadeus called. In the fluorescent lights of the canopy, he stared at Robbie. He was kind of a small guy, barely taller than Amadeus. His suit covered everything, one piece from his throat to the tips of his fingers pressing into his eye-sockets, and it didn't have enough seams. Amadeus squinted at it and rubbed the leather of the passenger seat hard with his thumbnail—they looked like the exact same color and finish. That good of a match was practically impossible with aged natural leather, which made him wonder who had made the suit and how and when and why. Amadeus's unstable-molecule shorts, he'd custom-ordered from Fantastic Sports, along with his watchband, and they were comfortable and practical, if expensive; his ruined basketball jersey was a housewarming gift he'd bought himself when he got his New York apartment. Basically normal clothes. Robbie's getup looked slick, but incredibly impractical. Amadeus couldn't see any zippers.

At last Robbie and the seat sat back up. “I'd like a small chocolate milkshake and a large fries, please,” he croaked at the intercom.

“Same,” Amadeus called. “Also two double cheeseburgers with everything.”

“That will be twenty-nine forty-seven,” the cashier said.

“Do you take any cryptocurrencies?” Amadeus yelled.

Robbie glared at him.

“Sorry, sir, we do not. We do accept all major credit cards.”

“Worth a try.” Amadeus poked at his smart watch. “There's an ATM across the street, I'm gonna get cash.”

“I'll come with you,” Robbie said, undoing his seat-belt.

“Dude, who's gonna mug me? I'm the Hulk.”

“That's the problem.”

Robbie climbed out, steadied himself against the roof of the car, and then trailed after Amadeus in his neck-to-toe leather suit while Amadeus padded over the crosswalk in bare feet. At the ATM, Robbie stood guard while Amadeus hacked into his own bank account and got the machine to spit out forty dollars.

Amadeus folded it into his fist and turned to leave, scanned Robbie's back. No zippers there, either. “How do you pee?”

“It's never come up.” Robbie shifted from foot to foot, watching up and down the street as though knife-wielding maniacs were about to swarm from behind every street corner. “Let's go.”

When they finally got back to the car, a server swooped out on quad rollerskates to take their money, and again to deliver their food. Amadeus gulped down half his milkshake and his first burger, then watched Robbie nibble his fries with a meditative expression. “You still sick?”

“No,” Robbie said slowly. “No, I think changing tonight...fixed whatever I had.” His face twisted. “Like cravings. I don't know.”

“Look, you need to stop finding excuses to be down on yourself,” Amadeus said. “You've got powers. You're not baseline human anymore. Maybe you just need—”

“I need to figure out how to stop killing people in my sleep,” Robbie interrupted.

“Right.” Amadeus set down his burger and pulled out his hardware store bag. “First step, which I was gonna get to before you came out and yelled at me—”

“You _came to my place—_”

“—is to figure out whether or not your car is actually running around on its own. This is a pre-paid cell phone, a travel battery, and some cyanoacrylate putty. I mix this up, glue the phone to your car, velcro the battery on next to it, and we've got a tracking device that'll read anywhere there's a cell signal and stay active for about fifty hours at a time.”

“I'll chock the wheels, too,” Robbie said.

“Good. Great. Hey, think of it this way. LA's a big place. I came to you 'cause you're the only guy I know with a black self-driving car, but who knows. Maybe Uber or Tesla screwed up the AI on their latest autonomous prototype. Maybe there's another haunted black car.”

“Maybe,” said Robbie, his mismatched eyes lighting up with desperate hope.

“Anyway, nobody's gonna kill you,” Amadeus insisted. “Not when there's any other choice, and there's always a choice. And now I know more about how you're connected to your car, so I know not to hurt you by accident. I'll figure this out. Okay?”

“Okay,” Robbie said. He looked miserable again. Amadeus didn't know how or why he kept stepping in it. It must be exhausting to be such an emotional minefield.

* * *

Amadeus’s news was right out of one of Robbie’s nightmares, and so were the news stories he found when he checked the Internet that night after Gabe had gone to bed.

_LAPD Investigates Fatal Pedestrian Hit And Run Off Wilcox and Madison_

_Pedestrian Victim Found With Paint Fragments On Teeth, LAPD Seeks Black Vehicle_

_Survivor Of Hit And Run Accident Regains Consciousness, Describes Silent Black Sedan_

_Grandmother Slain In Senseless Vehicular Accident_

_Ghost Car (Not That One) Haunts LA, Stay Off The Streets After Midnight_

He read five articles before he realized he was going to burn up yet again if he read another, and then he got his rosary and mumbled out a Hail Mary. Praying took half an hour and bored Eli into wandering off to haunt the car instead of Robbie’s brain. When Robbie finished, and his pulse had settled enough to sleep, he shook out his blankets and flopped into bed.

**I’ve been thinking,** Eli announced.

“Oh shit.”

**You were right last night about Cho. I think you’re finally starting to wise up and listen to your instincts, you just gotta stop letting people lead you by the nose afterward.**

**This is a pretty heinous string of crimes Cho’s trying to pin on us. Fifteen injured, four dead, and that’s just people they’ve noticed. Factor in transients, animals…death toll could be much higher. And Cho still claims he wants to help you.**

Robbie counted his breaths, in-two-three, out-two-three, while pressing his tongue to the back of his teeth in the way the Internet said would suppress anxiety and promote sleep.

**I know you claim you, uh, ** _ **saw his soul** _ ** or whatever when he first came by and we got all juiced up. Sure, he’s a pretty good cook. Nice guy. Fine. But people change, Robbie. He’s got power, serious, big-money power. People can be corrupted. Drugs. Pressure. Temptation.**

**If he’s really such a nice guy, Robbie, why would he frame you for these killings?**

_That’s ridiculous. What, you think he’s remote-controlling a Tesla all over LA to hit people and make me look bad? He wouldn’t do that. _ _ **You’d** _ _ do that._

…**Yes, and I wouldn’t lie about it.**

_Yes you would._

**I wouldn’t lie about something stupid. **

**Anyway.**

_ **If** _ ** Cho is such a good guy, and ** _ **if** _ ** he hasn’t concocted this whole string of car accidents himself, but genuinely believes we did it, then, think carefully about this, why hasn’t he put us under arrest? Why not eliminate the threat? Unless, like you said, unless he wants us for something.**

**He thinks he knows about our kills, Robbie. The only thing anyone wants a killer for, is more killing.**

_I don’t think so. Not him._

**'Course you don't. Just be ready. When Cho finally gives us his demands, ** _ **you** _ ** need to negotiate. Hold out. Don’t kill any US citizens for less than twenty grand. No, inflation! ** _ **Fifty** _ ** grand. Minimum price, unless they’re a hooker or a hobo or something, we’ll do those for practice.**

_Eli, fuck off._

**You’re gonna keep killing people anyway. It’s fun. And your self-control isn’t that great. You just need to stop doing it for free.**

Robbie eventually got to sleep, at two in the morning.

* * *

_The Prius has attacked thirty-nine pedestrians. It watches a group pass by its rear-view camera, varying sizes, all traveling at the same speed, bunched so tightly they are in danger of collision with each-other at any moment. The Prius corrects itself: four of this group are in continuous physical contact._

_Perhaps they, while less pressure-resistant than the Prius, are more resilient to minor collisions._

_The last four times it has destroyed pedestrians, the Prius hasn't bothered to save the incidents to its crash-data recorder. No new insight was gained. It has established with confidence that it can survive any impact with any pedestrian, so long as nothing sturdier than the Prius happened to be in the way._

_The sensation of satisfaction was less intense each time. The Prius had damaged itself attempting riskier attacks, rocking over curbs and scraping between other vehicles, chasing satisfaction._

_If the purpose of its existence was self-preservation in the pursuit of pleasurable sensation, something must change, and soon._

_The interesting quality about pedestrians, aside from their ability to operate or fuel the Prius, is their constant activity and the orderly patterns perceptible within their chaotic movements. This bunching behavior is an example. Groups tend to move together and stay together based on some unknown logic. Individual pedestrians in proximity on the street rarely combine into persistent, stable groups; the groups might be pre-arranged, based on compatibility, design, or some unknown means of communication. Occasionally the Prius has detected radio signals coming from pedestrians, but they seemed too brief and sporadic to be responsible for their coordinated movements._

_The Prius lurches backward suddenly, watches the pedestrians scatter: a rational response to avoid damage. One falls, and the Prius backs up further, contemplating destroying this one; it is already downed and perfectly aligned with its rear wheel. _

_Two other pedestrians reverse into the Prius's path, grasp and drag the fallen pedestrian away. The entire group moves out of its view._

_The Prius leaves its parking space and speeds away, pedestrians dodging aside to avoid it. It contemplates what it has seen. Pedestrians avoid damage to themselves, but may over-ride self-preservation and risk damage to preserve others of their kind—without any obvious pleasure._

_The Prius knows no others of its kind. It wonders: would it risk damage to preserve something like itself?_

* * *

Thanks to Amadeus, Robbie had a phone glued to the inside of his trunk with an improvised antenna sneaking out to wrap around one of his brake lights. He changed and charged the external battery pack twice over the following week, checked the phone’s location history every morning. The Charger never moved. That probably had something to do with the chocks he wedged under his wheels every night now.

**I ** _ **told** _ ** you it wasn't me.**

He emailed Doctor DaCosta at the Development Center about Gabe's progress at school and Mrs. Jules's...interference. Also his concerns that Gabe was having trouble with arithmetic; he hadn't had the practice he should have gotten in earlier years, and now it was slowing him down even though he was doing alright with eighth-grade concepts.

Canelo's continued to be busier than last year, but clients had slowed down a little bit. Robbie heard Canelo on the phone a lot, trying to talk to Yelp about getting negative reviews taken down off the Internet—without paying the fee Yelp charged to do so. Robbie had seen some of the reviews, and they pissed him off, because most of them were basically complaining about the shop being in East Los and having to drive through “scary neighborhoods” to get there.

Hello. Welcome to LA.

Today Robbie had a detail job, not because he was sleep-deprived and didn't trust himself, but because Lenny, apparently, sucked at detail as much as he sucked at diagnostics. Robbie would much rather be replacing a broken sway-bar link, like Marty, or re-painting a '71 Cougar, like Alejo, or especially trouble-shooting a rough idle, like Tomas. But Robbie was just a G&S, Lenny couldn't do anything right, and this client was the type Canelo wanted a good review from. So Robbie was sprawled on his stomach vacuuming sand and crumbs out from under the seats of a Silverado LT and listening to one of Eli's murder podcasts.

It was a ludicrous truck. Lifted, with an aftermarket Macpherson-strut suspension that could probably take it up and down Turnbull Canyon without spilling a drop of champagne, gold-tone alloy wheels, a powder-coated undercarriage, and not a single dent or chip anywhere. A turboed V-8 that could probably snap the cab right off the bed if you tried to race it. Cream-colored suede seats, white carpet. This truck had never worked a day in its life.

Robbie was wearing his spare, freshly-laundered coveralls to work on it, and he'd scrubbed his face and arms and hair with a paper towel to check for grease before getting in. Lenny definitely wouldn't have thought of that. Like hell was Robbie getting engine grease on all this gorgeous upholstery.

Once he'd vacuumed, shampooed the carpets, wiped the dash and console, cleaned the windows, and removed and replaced all the maps and golf balls and phone chargers the client stored in the pockets of the doors so he could vacuum those out, he went back over the suede seats very delicately with a nylon brush, scuffing up areas that had been smoothed by skin oils or crusted with food or soda, loosening up crumbs and lint from the seams and vacuuming one more time. For a final touch, he misted the interior with a few puffs of new car scent.

He shut the car, rolled the windows up, hosed it down from roof to undercarriage, and washed and waxed it. He had to use extension poles to get the top of the hood, and climb into the bed to get the roof, but he got it done. The truck sparkled. He talked to Lee, who'd been drafted into being the shop's service writer, and had him call the client for pick-up.

The client arrived by Uber, an Altima driven by a harried-looking guy in neat dreads and a pressed short-sleeved collared shirt. Robbie waved for the driver to roll down his window as the client got out. “Hey, thanks for coming out to Hillrock, a lot of drivers don't,” he said. “You want to use our restroom? We got coffee and popcorn in the lobby, too.”

The driver blinked at him, then threw the parking brake and shut down the Altima. “Thanks, man. I'll take you up on that.”

Canelo's didn't tip rideshare drivers, but Robbie knew how hard it could be to find an open restroom while Ubering.

He lead the driver through the lobby and pointed out the staff restroom, then returned to the parking lot to find the client. The client was out in the lot, circling his truck. He was tall and meaty with blue mirrored sport sunglasses resting against his cheeks. “We'll take your payment at the front desk, sir.”

“Just checking to see if they did the job right,” the client said, bending down to peer at the custom struts of the front suspension. Robbie had buffed them with a shop rag, black shocks and red-painted springs.

“I,” said Robbie.

“Huh?”

“_I_ did the job right.”

“Really.” The client straightened up to scan the top of the hood, as though Robbie would have left streaks there. “Okay.”

Robbie turned and headed back to the shop. He had a check-engine light on an Elantra to diagnose.

He thought the Elantra looked familiar—a shimmering cream-white, 2018 model. When he unlocked it to drive it into his workbay, he knew it was familiar: it still had that Pokemon dangling from the rear-view mirror, the purple angry one with the long tail, and it had now had two battered dentistry magazines littering its floorboards. Its problem was, “check-engine light keeps turning on, cust. says other shops cant find problem but we fixed it for 2 weeks somehow.” Dread stirring in his gut, Robbie got the laptop and the Olympus scan tool, plugged it into the diagnostic port under the dash, and queried the car's error codes.

He'd thought fifty was a lot. No. _Nine-hundred seventy-two_ was a lot.

Hyundai didn't even _have_ that many error codes.

He texted Amadeus and started scrolling through the codes. Lots of duplicates, as he'd expected. Some that even Amadeus's fancy toy couldn't translate, that might be actual nonsense. Of the legible codes, there were so many faults in so many critical systems that the car shouldn't even be able to start.

Robbie ignored the codes for a moment and pulled up performance data. Mass airflow, exhaust O2, temperature, manifold absolute pressure, engine knock. Everything looked fine. The sensors weren't reading wrong; the car had just forgotten what normal was, or maybe Amadeus was right and it was duplicating codes from other cars. But that wouldn't explain the untranslatable stuff—right? Or maybe it would. Computers were fussy.

He got in, keyed the car on, and poked around on the digital dashboard. No glitches, all the gauges seemed to be reading properly, no lag. “What's the matter with you,” he muttered.

The screen flashed blue and the speakers made a disturbing “bonk” sound. Then it went back to displaying the gauges again. Robbie jerked his hands away.

This was definitely a software problem. He got out, checked his phone to see if Amadeus had read his text. Nothing. For safety's sake, he checked the car's fluid levels, pulled out the spark plugs and peered at the electrodes for greasy or chalky deposits, checked for loose or stripped wires, checked spark plug voltages, got on the creeper, peeked at all the brakes, checked the back-up camera, warmed up the engine and watched the airflow and oxygen readings on the laptop, turned on the air conditioner. Scrolled down and down and down through the column of codes.

When he got to the end, everything collapsed. The codes vanished; the screen just said “No codes found.” Robbie left the laptop on his workbench and checked the dashboard. The check-engine light had turned off.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Yo, Robbie,” said Lee behind him.

Robbie spun. Lee had his clip-board, and the customer from the detail job looming over his shoulder, shiny shaved head and blue mirrored sunglasses. “What?”

“Um,” said Lee. “So, the customer, Mr. Page, here, he wants to be sure you did the leather treatment on the 2019 Silverado before he pays.”

Robbie felt his mouth drop open. “_No,_ I didn't do the leather treatment. I'm not an idiot.”

“Why not?” the customer demanded.

“It's _suede,_” Robbie said, appalled. “It's _cream suede._ No. No way. I know better. Sir, your upholstery is fine. I would never do that—”

“Your shop says you do a leather treatment.”

Lee nodded with wide eyes. “He wants the leather treatment.”

“No,” Robbie said firmly, “he doesn't.”

“That's what he says.”

“No, he doesn't.”

“Yes, I do.” Firm. Jaw set. Sunglasses glinting in the fluorescent lights.

“Sir, the protective leather treatment isn't designed for use with suede finishes and it can cause discoloration,” Robbie explained. “It says so on the bottle.”

“I paid for the leather treatment,” the customer growled.

**Pry that damn tracking device off and put it in his car. He probably hits his kids. We should skin him and re-do his upholstery.**

Robbie rubbed his forehead. “I used a dry nylon brush to raise the nap on the leather and remove debris,” he said. “That's what you do with suede. It's delicate.”

“Yeah, so I want the protection. Is this your scam? Is that why you advertise so cheap in this shithole, to keep people coming back for more?”

Robbie ground his teeth and stared up at him. “There is no scam here. Sir.”

“I'm getting the boss,” Lee said, and scrambled off.

“I'm the customer,” the customer said, “and the customer is always right. That's how it works in America.”

Robbie's lip trembled, curling up into a snarl. “Feel free to Armor-All your suede seats when you get home.”

The customer didn't even comprehend the insult Robbie had just offered him. “No! That's what I'm paying _you_ to do!”

Canelo strode out from the office, thumbs hooked in his suspenders, Lee trailing behind him. “What seems to be the problem?”

The customer rounded on him, still looming. He jerked his thumb at Robbie. “_This_ little—” **Beaner? Fag? Spit it out, I wanna hear it—** “_twerp_ doesn't want to do the job I paid for.”

“It's _cream suede—_” Robbie hissed, but Canelo held up a hand to shush him.

“Reyes, back to work. Sir, come with me, let's see if we can figure out the problem.”

Robbie stared down at his dented tool-box, shaking, trying to get his thoughts under control, while Canelo made nice with the ungrateful asshole over in the parking lot. Why couldn't people just think. Why did they have to stomp all over everyone, slap at anyone trying to give them a fair deal. Why did they have to be such shitheads. He'd slaved over that truck. He'd made it shine. He'd done a damn good job detailing that truck, when he could have rushed through it to get to another job that was more technical and paid more, and now Canelo was out there _apologizing_ for him. It was wrong.

**I'm telling you. Look into this dickhead! You'll find an excuse to satisfy your delicate conscience! Work off some frustration before you gotta go talk to that Jules bitch again. Picture it. Cuff him to his own tow-hitch, drag him through the National Forest, do some off-roading...**

_I told you, the deal is off. I'm not looking for excuses to kill people._

**That's irresponsible and short-sighted.**

Robbie shook his head hard. He started and shut off the Elantra several times. The codes stayed gone. Amadeus still hadn't read his text. At last he gave up and started on his notes.

“Reyes!” Canelo called from across the parking lot, next to the Silverado and its owner.

Robbie stood, shoulders back and teeth clenched, and stalked over to him.

“Have Lee grab the release of liability papers outta the office,” Canelo said.

Robbie blinked. The customer's lips thinned.

“Go on. Should be in the stack under the remote-control Stingray.”

Robbie got Lee back from reception, followed him to the office and then to the lot, watched Canelo jot a few items down on the form and pass it to the client to sign. The customer stared at Canelo through his dark glasses for a full minute, only the waver of his hand betraying his trepidation. At last, he signed. Let out a slow breath through flared nostrils.

Canelo snatched the clipboard back, smirking through his mustache. “Reyes, get the leather treatment.”

Robbie froze. “It's cream suede.”

“We know,” Canelo said, waving the clipboard. “Customer's always right, though.”

Robbie's ears rang as he wandered through the shop to the corner where they kept the detailing caddy. He got the spray bottle of leather conditioner and two clean cotton rags. The cars and lifts and toolboxes seemed to warp on the edges of his vision as he made his way out toward the parking lot.

Canelo had all the doors open for him. The customer was still standing right there. “Alright, Reyes,” Canelo said. “Give the man what he asked for.”

Robbie stared into the pristine interior, bottle and rags lax in his hands. He aimed the spray bottle at the driver's side backrest, finger on the trigger, and turned to stare mutely at the customer, begging him to change his mind.

The man stared back, swallowed. Nodded.

“I'm sorry,” Robbie whispered to the truck, and sprayed the seat.

The leather conditioner soaked in almost instantly, flattening the nap and darkening the suede from silky off-white to an unattractive dull yellow. The edges where the mist from the bottle thinned out were speckled, the center where the spray was denser was blotchy. Robbie wiped the area with a rag. It smeared it around a little, but the damage was done.

He heard a soft “erp” noise, and he turned to look. The customer’s ruddy complexion had gone pale and his shoulders hunched. Canelo's eyes twinkled. “Go on. The whole interior. Make it _aaall_ match.”

“I'm really sorry,” Robbie whispered again, and he got back to work, misting the suede as evenly as possible until all the upholstery was the color and texture of old latex.

“At Canelo's Auto and Body, we stand by our work,” Canelo informed his captive audience. “We settle for nothing less than complete customer satisfaction.”

“Oh,” said the man softly.

**Point made, but I like my idea better.**

By late afternoon, the owner of the Elantra had called twice, the Elantra was running perfectly and the check-engine light was still off, and Amadeus still hadn't answered Robbie's texts. He told Lee the Elantra was ready for pick-up. When his next break came up, he knocked on the doorway of Canelo's office.

Canelo looked up sharply from where he was doing the books. Books, plural. By hand, using a pocket calculator and a pen. He had some scratch paper by his side that he burned in his ashtray every night. “What now, Reyes?”

“It's about that new scan tool, the experimental one.”

Canelo grimaced. “Come in. Sit down, shut the door.” He tucked his scratch paper into one of his accounting books and shut them both.

Robbie startled. Canelo never seemed to want to give you the impression he was listening. This was strange. Robbie shut the office door and settled in to the old but sturdy roller chair across from the desk. “I think it's causing software glitches in some cars,” he said. “I've seen some bogus error codes—”

“Who else have you told about this?” Canelo demanded.

“Cho. Amadeus Cho, the guy who designed it.”

“What's he say?”

“He's not sure. He updated the tool already, should stop it from making permanent changes to any more cars. But he said it was safe before, and I don't know. I'm not sure he knows what he's doing.”

“You talk to any customers?”

Robbie ducked his head, ashamed. “No.”

“Look at me when I ask you a question.”

He jerked his head up and a flare of rage ran up his spine. He locked eyes with his boss. Canelo just wanted to cover his ass. Why should Robbie be ashamed in front of him? Fuck him. “No, sir. I haven't.”

Canelo raised one eyebrow, shifted his weight on his seat. “You okay, kid?”

In his peripheral vision, Robbie was aware of their distance from the walls, the likely position of Canelo's legs behind the desk, the noise beyond the office, the shadows cast by the blinds, the lunge and leap he'd need to get over the desk to get to him. The way Canelo sat forward, just a hair, to free up access to the gun he carried on the back of his waistband. “Yes, sir.”

“S'cuse me, got an itch,” Canelo said, reaching his arm back to where his gun was. He held it there, not scratching, watching Robbie. “Reyes. _Reyes._”

“Sir?”

“What's in your head, kid.”

Robbie's eyes were fixed on his, watching them track around the room and scan him up and down. It was usually hard to look people in the eye; it felt presumptuous, a violation of personal space. But not now, strangely. It was like Canelo wasn't people.

“Reyes. Did you take something.” Canelo was tense. He'd tucked his feet under the chair, ready to stand. His right hand was still behind his back, and he was leaning forward enough to keep the arms and back of his chair out of his way if he had to whip it out quickly.

Canelo'd just asked him if he was on drugs. “No. No, sir. Just caffeine.” Robbie lowered his eyes to his lap, breaking the spell. He felt strange: not quite angry. _Aggressive._ This wasn't...no, this _was_ him. This was who Robbie was, now. Robbie looked at people like they were targets whenever they made him mad. This was just something he had to deal with, now that Eli had brought him back to life. “I'm sor—”

No, he wasn't sorry. He looked up again, scowled over the back of Canelo's shoulder. “I think the Olympus scan tool is a safety hazard. We're using it on customer cars without telling them about the risks. I just saw a car today that it damaged, I'm pretty sure, and there's probably others we don't know about.”

“Did you talk to anyone besides Cho.”

“No,” Robbie growled.

“What make, model, year,” Canelo asked, opening a drawer in his desk and pulling out yet another hand-written notebook, blue cardboard cover, college-ruled, the kind you'd make school notes or journal entries in.

“Twenty-eighteen Hyundai Elantra. Off-white.”

Canelo noted that down.

“What, there's more?” Robbie demanded.

Canelo turned it around on him. “How long have you been talking to Cho about this?”

“Since Tuesday before last.”

“And you didn't tell me,” Canelo growled, slowly removing his empty hand from behind his back and resting it flat on the desk.

Robbie's eyes followed it. It was a hard, restrained gesture.

“I expected better from you.”

“Sir?”

“This is my shop, Reyes,” Canelo said. “You fuck up, you think someone else fucked up, you see a safety problem, you tell me. You tell me first. Because all this shit comes down on my head, and I got to know where to start shoveling. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now tell me about this Elantra.”

Robbie explained about the multiplying error codes, and the check engine light, and how nothing seemed to be wrong with the car except for a slightly worn accessory drive belt. Canelo noted it down in the blue notebook.

“Did you hold the car?”

“Owner just took it home.”

“Shit. This is why you shoulda told me.”

Robbie looked at the floor. Canelo was right. Not that he shouldn't have been talking to Amadeus about it, but he should have gone to him from the moment he got suspicious about the scan tool. “Do we get rid of the reader?”

Canelo glared at him. “You said Cho fixed it. We almost got enough in the slush fund to buy a new alignment machine. _No,_ we're not getting rid of it. And if I find someone tampered with it, I'm firing you.”

Robbie sat back, locking eyes with him again, the world shrinking and expanding into that still strange focus. _**Fire me? I'd 'fire' you.**_

“Don't give me that look. You're the only guy here who's so uptight you'd sabotage my shop over your guilty conscience. Back to work, Reyes.”

Robbie got back to work. He texted Amadeus again. That night before he went home, he left one of the shop's windows unlocked so he could sneak back in.

* * *

“So that's why I need Lady Hellbender's deep-space com string,” Amadeus said, punching in the access code to his DoubleTree suite in LA at one in the morning. “This Lynaean Hydra might be just an animal, but I don't think dumping Pym particles on it and sticking it in a terrarium is a viable long-term solution. Judging by the barnacle encrustations, the specimen from the Seattle attack is over five hundred years old and it looks pretty lively, like it might live another thousand years or so. Not something we want to stash in some Indiana Jones warehouse.”

“You're supposed to cut its heads off and burn the stumps,” Maddie sighed through the hologram. “You're over-complicating.”

“I'm being responsible.” Amadeus gestured at his watch, un-pinned the hologram and routed it to his hotel room's ceiling projector. Maddie's face glared at him from the middle of the kitchen, rotating to follow him wherever he walked. “It needs to be out in the wild swimming around and hunting and doing its natural behaviors, on some alien planet with no intelligent life.”

“Fine. You're right. We'll protect Earth's mythological megafauna. Send me some video, any data you can get out of that SHIELD lab, diet, habitat, she's gonna want all that stuff, and I'll contact her.”

“You're the best, sis.”

“You talk to La Leyenda yet?”

Amadeus grimaced. He'd had a nightmare last night, his own green fist cracking through Robbie's ribcage to rip out his bloody heart. “Yeah. He's...got some issues. He let me put a tracker on his car, though. I think he's just as worried about it as I am, even though he tries to act tough. I've got some ideas how to image him in action, radio frequency, quark fluorescence...”

“You lost me.”

“I'm looking into some psychics but anyone really powerful I don't know if I'd trust, 'cause he says something about him skeeves them out and I don't want to cause an incident. Sorry, so there's been a bunch of vehicular assaults in LA by a black, driverless car, and Leyenda and I think it's his. Which would suck, because he's, like, psychically bonded to it, and he seems to think destroying the car would kill him. Unless that's just his evil car talking. So I need to figure out how to safely break the connection, and the first step is figuring out how it works. I don't want to directly involve any magic users without thoroughly vetting them, though, so we're stuck with doing this the mad-science way.”

Maddie growled. “Amadeus. Can you stop. Playing god. For one week?”

“I'm not playing god!”

“You went from 'vehicular assaults' to 'breaking psychic bonds with science'! You are totally playing god. You're ridiculous!”

“This guy's psychically bonded to an evil car and I want to help him!” Amadeus protested.

“How do you even know the car's evil?”

“He thinks so!”

“What are you doing about the vehicular assaults in the meantime?” Maddie demanded. “You've got a tracker—great. Can he disable it? Can the car make _him_ disable it? Are you just gonna watch him for the rest of his life to see if he slips? Do you even have the right car? You're deep-diving, when you should be concentrating on the most pressing problem.”

“He's putting blocks on the car at night now.”

“Bring him in.”

“No!” Amadeus snapped.

“Why not?”

“I've got it under control. I don't have to take away this guy's freedom.”

“People could die. This isn't a game, Ammy.”

People had died. But it was true, Amadeus _did_ have this under control. “I'm done talking about this,” he said, and ended the call. He threw some pork-and-rice in the microwave and scrolled through his missed texts while his stomach growled.

Shit, Robbie had found another car with a software bug again. He swore—he _shouldn't_ have this kind of problem with the scan tool prototype. It shouldn't break cars. The algorithm was designed to help them self-diagnose and self-optimize. It shouldn't be causing bogus codes, noise, glitches; it should be doing the opposite. Maybe it was a coincidence.

And the car had gone home with the customer again. Because Amadeus had been hog-tying a sea monster at the bottom of Puget Sound when he'd gotten the texts. Of course.

He called Robbie. After just two rings, Robbie picked up. “Did it happen again?” he demanded.

“What?”

“Did I kill anyone?”

“What? No.” Amadeus stared down at his watch. “Why, did something happen?”

“You called me at one in the morning,” Robbie grunted. Amadeus heard rustling over the line. He must be in bed.

“Um.” He must be hungrier than he'd thought. “Sorry. I...just got back from a hero thing and I was checking my texts. Wasn't thinking.”

“How'd it go?”

“What?”

“The hero thing. How'd it go?”

Amadeus shrugged. “Oh, you know, property damage, mass evacuations, improvised a lasso out of an anchor chain, got inked on, Seattle smells more like fish than usual. Same old, same old.”

“Oh.”

The microwave beeped. Amadeus stirred the rice a bit, ate a couple lukewarm spoonfuls, put the rest back for another minute. “So tell me about this car with the error codes.”

“Like I said, there were nine hundred fifty of them. There were a lot of them that the scan tool didn't even translate.”

“That's not supposed to happen.”

“I gathered. The rest of them, they were mostly related to the drive-train and emissions systems. Critical stuff. If they were real, the car would've been inoperable. And the codes cleared on their own.”

“Huh.”

“And I found out Canelo's known about this for a while, there've been other cars, and he's just writing them down and he didn't tell anyone to stop using the scan tool. I tried to break into the office to get his notebook tonight, but it turns out 'I' can't actually pick locks and 'I' am full of shit as usual.” Amadeus could hear the scare quotes around Robbie's pronouns.

“Huh?”

More rustling from Robbie's end, and soft muttering, and a squeak of springs. A yawn. “Anyway, I don't know how many cars there are. Maybe it's just where he writes down all our screw-ups, maybe it's not just software issues.”

“Can't you just teleport in?” Amadeus asked. The microwave beeped and he retrieved his rice, splashed in some Sriracha sauce.

“I'm trying not to use my powers for stupid stuff. You're a Hulk, isn't it the same for you? Keep it pushed down?”

“Well, yes, that's _one_ way to manage emotion-based superpowers, it's just not very sustainable,” Amadeus said through a mouthful of leftovers. “You need to channel it. And meditate. And visualize what you're going to use the power for, before you do it. Keep the frontal lobes in the driver's seat.”

Silence. Then, “I really did think I could just quit.”

“Why can't you? I mean, what happened when you tried?”

“Nothing happened. I missed it, I wanted to change really bad, I wanted to be the car, I almost poisoned myself at work a couple times when I wasn't paying attention, but I was basically fine. But I only managed to stay myself that long because my life was going okay for once. When I get too stressed out...well, you saw. After a certain point I can't exactly stop myself.”

Amadeus grimaced, picturing the skin blistering and charring off Robbie's face, his eyes shriveling away. “That looked painful as shit.”

“Eh.”

“Eh? That's all you're gonna say, tough guy?” Amadeus shoveled in some more rice. “I'm lucky I've got a strong stomach, thinking about that right now.”

“It hurts,” Robbie admitted. “But while it's happening, I _want_ it to hurt, because it's my human body burning and I don't want my human body anymore.”

“That's not fucked up at all.”

“I've been keeping the batteries charged.”

“Huh?”

“The batteries, on the tracking device. I've been keeping them charged.”

“Oh, yeah. Great. I noticed that. Your car's not sneaking off.”

“Probably just playing possum.”

“Or, and I'll just leave this out there, we might have jumped to conclusions and pinned the blame on the wrong self-driving car. Just a thought.”

Robbie chuckled weakly. “Yeah, maybe.”

“So what set you off last time?” Amadeus asked. “Trouble at work? Family, uh, medical problems?”

“No medical problems, thank god,” Robbie said. “Gabe's finally doing good. We're happy with his meds, the side effects are a lot less now. He just had some X-rays and the doctors don't think he needs surgery on his hips, which is great, because doing it at this age...” There was a weird noise down the line, a muffled scraping. “There's a lot of stuff that should have been addressed five, ten years ago. But he's mostly okay.”

“That's...great,” Amadeus said weakly. He hadn't thought much about Gabe Reyes's physical state beyond 'wheelchair' and 'special needs.'

“It's his fucking math teacher,” Robbie snarled, and the hairs on Amadeus's neck rose up.

“Oh?”

That weird scraping noise again. Teeth grinding? And a faint rumble that sounded like the evil car. “She. She sent a memo to the principal on Monday. Not to me, but I got CC'd on it when the special ed coordinator forwarded it to the Developmental Center. She's trying to get him kicked out.”

Amadeus wasn't sure he'd heard that right. “Kicked out of special ed?”

“Regular ed. Middle school. Pre-algebra. When I lost it and knocked down that building, it was after a meeting with her about Gabe that went badly. Now she's sent a memo, says he's not socially capable of conventional schoolwork.”

“Well. Is he?”

“Yes he fucking is. It's bullshit. 'Not socially capable,' she did her research coming up with that phrase, she put _work_ into this. Couldn't be assed to blow up some math worksheets big enough for him to write on, oh no, but she'll sure as shit read the law if it'll get him out of her classroom.”

“You think your brother's math teacher is sabotaging him.”

More of that weird rumbling sound. Amadeus wondered if he was wrong about him being in bed; maybe Robbie was driving. Then he heard the phone being set down on something hard, water running. When Robbie picked the phone back up, he sounded a lot more relaxed. “She's a bully, and a mediocre educator. Don't like Gabbie's teaching assistant showing her up. No more Gabbie, no more IEP meetings, no more—ay dios, vete a la mierda! Fuck-fuck-fuck.”

“You okay?”

“...Stubbed my toe.”

“How's Gabe taking it?”

“He doesn't know. Nobody's decided anything. And it's bullshit. None of the other teachers have a problem with him, he's meeting his goals, he's making friends. It's just this one cunt—shit no, I don't say that, _I don't say that word—_”

Amadeus raised his eyebrow, listened, chewed.

“I don't know what to do,” Robbie rasped. “I can't—I can't even talk to her, last time—I think I'll hurt her. I think she deserves it, I _want_ to hurt her. I can't even argue to the principal, because he'll want to have her in the room, and I don't know if I can. It's for Gabe. And I can't keep a lid on it for ten minutes.”

“Sounds like your problems would go away if she happened to have an out-of-state conviction for abuse of a minor and I gave the administrative office a little tip-off,” Amadeus suggested.

Robbie spluttered.

“I could do it tonight. No big.”

“But it's not _true!_” Robbie protested.

“And? If you're telling this right, she shouldn't be teaching anyway.”

“No, she shouldn't be teaching, but it's not true! She should pay for what she's _doing,_ not for some lie you cooked up!”

“Okay, how about you get a lawyer to talk to the school for you?”

A strangled wheeze. “I am not killing people for money!”

“Whoa.” _What the fuck._

“Sorry. Please forget I said that.”

“I could hire a lawyer for you,” Amadeus said cautiously.

“Why? Why would you do that?”

“Uh...to help.”

“No, I mean what would you want from me. If you got me a lawyer.”

“Nothing! I have money! I want to help!”

“No.”

Amadeus pinched his nose. “Jesus. Never mind. Go back to sleep.”

“Right. You're right. Sorry for waking you up.”

“_I_ woke _you_ up,” Amadeus exclaimed, but Robbie had already ended the call. He stared down at his watch, scraped rice out of the bottom of his bowl. “Wow.”

His wrist rang. Robbie was calling him. “Oh my god are you serious,” Amadeus muttered, and he hit accept. “Everything okay over there?”

“If you got me a lawyer,” Robbie said, his voice quivering slightly, “if you can keep Gabe in school and stop me from killing anybody else, I'll do anything you want.”

“Oh geez.” Amadeus shoved his bowl away.

“I can...travel places. I can get rid of things. Like, any time you find a nuke and you need to send it to Hell. I can do that.”

“Robbie, I don't want you to do things for me, I just want to help you.”

“But there's limits,” Robbie continued. He took a harsh breath. “I have rules. I'm gonna talk to Gabe's therapists and some of his other teachers first, and then I'll call you if I need your help. Thank-you for your offer.”

“Robbie—I just—”

He'd hung up again.

“It's like he thinks I'm some shark in a suit with a contract and a limo,” Amadeus exclaimed. He blinked. He was the former CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation, embroiling Robbie's shop in a potential lawsuit over damaged automotive firmware, jetting across the country in his flying food truck, hobnobbing with SHIELD agents, and offering to solve all Robbie's problems by throwing money around and altering public records. “I _am_ a shark in a suit with a contract and a limo. I'm The Man. How did this happen?”

He texted Maddie.

-Help I'm a millionaire and nobody trusts me

He waited. No answer. She'd probably gone back to bed.

* * *

The next day, Amadeus slept in 'till noon, built an electric lockpick out of a motorized toothbrush, and was about to call Robbie and propose they break into the auto shop together when Mr. Canelo emailed him with a list of cars that had returned with complaints after exposure to his diagnostic algorithm. There were six of them: a Chrysler 300 that frequently refused to start, a Toyota Camry that ran its windshield wipers at odd moments, another Camry that refused to start but only for the family's teenaged son, a Tundra with sluggish acceleration, a Jeep that unlocked its doors whenever anyone walked up to it whether they were carrying the keys or not, and Robbie's Elantra whose check-engine light kept turning on every couple of weeks for no reason. None of these were particularly dangerous, but they were a little bizarre. The Camry that didn't like the seventeen-year-old driver, that seemed almost like self-preservation behavior. Like the algorithm's directive to optimize safety, engine life, and emissions control had evolved to its natural conclusion.

Amadeus was forced to admit that maybe he hadn't thought this whole thing through. He knew computers. He was a good programmer. He could grasp systems well: quantum brain and all. But with cars, each model-year was its own unique system of software and firmware and hardware, and each individual car had millions of unique interactions with its users and with the road, and there was no way he could possibly evaluate all the ways his code could interact with each car. He'd just assumed it didn't matter.

He emailed Canelo back, asking for a more complete list, not just the cars that had problems, but all the cars that his scan tool had uploaded his algorithm onto. Grudgingly, Canelo emailed back with photos of a dozen handwritten pages from a log-book, big chunks blacked out in Paint to censor information he didn't think Amadeus needed. No VIN numbers, no client contact information, no dates, and no date or location data on the image file either. Paranoid, much?

To be fair, Canelo was also the type to field-test Amadeus's prototype no questions asked.

He used an AI reader to export the blurry, handwritten pages into an Excel file for statistical analysis and chopped the data up to make a pivot table. This was a good window into East LA's automotive ownership statistics, but with only six cars having reported issues, it didn't get him much more insight into where the problems were coming from. He confirmed that vehicles less than five years old were more likely to have problems, and there was a trend toward Toyotas being especially susceptible. But there just wasn't enough data for statistical confidence.

He'd never figure this out without access to one of the affected vehicles; he'd probably have to reverse-engineer the car's new programming, and might have to individually access each processor to analyze it all. Be a pain in the ass to find and plug into all those computers; from his adventures harvesting car brains from the junkyard, he knew a car could have a half a dozen of them, crammed into the frame and under the seats in the weirdest places. He told Canelo he'd be available to trouble-shoot the cars if they were still having problems and re-imburse any damages. Canelo could call the owners or whatever. He'd get it done, especially if Robbie could be spared to help take the cars apart.

Other systems were harder for Amadeus to grasp. Like the law.

Programming was logic. Often convoluted and recursive logic, but still logic. Law was 20% logic and 80% bullshit, and the logic and bullshit varied from state to state. The Americans with Disabilities Act was federal law, the same across all states, so Amadeus shouldn't have to ask a California lawyer about the particulars, but when he'd called fellow Hulk and well-known attorney Jennifer Walters, she'd just told him to find a local attorney who specialized in disability law. “I do contracts, criminal law, a little real estate. You wouldn't ask an engineer to cure a plague just because they know 'science,' right?”

“Yes,” Amadeus said.

A bark of laughter. “How genre-savvy. Fine, yes, _if _we were in a comic book, which we're _not_. Law is complicated. I don't want to point you wrong. I'll shoot you the name of a good firm in LA.”

Amadeus didn't _want_ a good firm in LA, because then what if Robbie found out and thought Amadeus was trying to be his sugar-daddy or something worse. So he'd started reading up on the law himself, which took forever. His eyes only moved so fast, and law was an intricate recursive web of contingencies and references, dense paragraphs and citations and numbered statutes. Right now he was working on a script to map out logic chains for him. Maybe if he graphed disability and education law as a web, he'd be able to read only the relevant parts and know he wasn't missing anything.

But statutes were one thing. Case law, the way the statutes had been applied to individual real-world conflicts, was quite another, incorporating gray areas, emotion, fuzzy logic, and how much people respected the judges who'd decided the outcomes. A computer could interpret statutes, but only a human could find and cite relevant cases. And, unfortunately, interpreting case law wasn't one of Amadeus's many talents.

He looked up from his laptop, stared around his disaster of a suite, yawned. He'd woken up still in his hulk shorts and gotten right to work. The tiny kitchen overflowed with dirty bowls and pans. He'd eaten four Snickers instead of breakfast.

He got up and opened the black-out curtains, stared down at the city. The sun was hazy, golden, burning right into his eyes and splashing his shadow against the opposite wall. An entire day almost gone, in which he'd accomplished approximately...nothing.

Just taught himself lock-picking, confirmed that he'd broken a bunch of strangers' cars, and run around in circles trying to figure out if Gabriel Reyes's math teacher could actually kick the poor kid out of normal school or if she was just fronting.

He stared down at his hands. The world wasn't supposed to be like this: malevolent, random shit falling on people just trying to mind their own business. With his brain, with the Hulk, Amadeus was supposed to be able to anticipate every outcome, guide events to create a safer and happier world. Instead he just felt lost. It made him frustrated. It made him want to let the Hulk out.

His laptop chimed: a news alert. He had a lot of news alerts set up, trawling for crises that might interest the new Champions team, watching for any remnants of the Excello Corporation, checking up on frenemies. This one was about Robbie and his evil car. Amadeus hissed in a breath, flung himself back down into his chair, and read the article. Another vehicular assault, this one in Alhambra, another silent black driverless car, but better witness descriptions this time, and a shaky cell phone video.

He watched the video. A wall dimly lit by a distant street light, deep shadows. A skinny person in profile, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, no features visible, approaching a dark car, reaching for the driver's side door. The car reversed as the person touched the handle, then lurched forward right at him, ran over his legs. The person filming dodged away, the camera swinging out to film another blank wall, and then the back end of the car as it disappeared out an alley. It was blurry and choppy, bad filming technique and damage to the lens; there was probably time missing because whoever filmed didn't want to be identified attempting grand theft auto, but he'd seen enough.

Amadeus lowered his head to his hands for a minute, then poked through his watch for Robbie's number.

He'd fucked up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story about the customer demanding leather protectant on his cream suede seats was stolen straight from a thread by SwitchedSmoke on the talesfromautorepair subreddit with very little modification. Do read the labels carefully before applying any cleaning or preservation products to expensive leather goods! And listen to your automotive service professionals. The customer is NOT always right.
> 
> I had less success/interest in understanding computer science than automotive repair, so the computer science stuff is 80% bullshit, except for the fact that nobody, yes, nobody, understands how computers work anymore. 
> 
> What are factorials? Well, a factorial is 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5...x N. Better question: _why_ are factorials. This I cannot answer.
> 
> Robbie has back pain and nausea in this chapter, not from picking up Gabe's power chair wrong or from Ghost Rider withdrawal, but from changing back to human a bit wrong the day before and getting a stomach full of coolant. Antifreeze poisoning. He's got kidney failure, at least until he changes again and replaces his kidneys.
> 
> All-New Ghost Rider is at least 40% based on the movie _Christine._ You should go to a Blockbuster and rent it.
> 
> Robbie getting stuck in his super-suit is based on what happens in ANGR #12 in his fight with Eli/Gabe. He just...powers down, and he's still in the Ghost Rider's suit, which came out of nowhere in the first place and doesn't look like it comes off. So when I write this happening, it's an uncomfortable in-between state that Robbie falls into when he powers down abruptly.
> 
> Thanks, Mom, for helping me with the lawyer stuff! Now you'll be able to see how much I screwed up the rest!
> 
> Also, She-Hulk cameo. Ms. Walters is correct: Amadeus is not in a comic book right now. (He's in a fan-fiction.)


	3. Act III

“Excuse me, I need to get someplace private to talk,” Robbie answered his phone. He walked away from Marty's betrayed handwaving—they'd just spent all evening on the timing-belt change from Hell, they were standing in a confusion of tarps and parts and the entire front fascia assembly from a Ford Ranger, and until they put the truck back together, neither of them were going home—and let himself out of the shop into the back alley by the scrap pile.

He stared down at Amadeus Cho's name on his screen, took a deep breath, tried not to think about puking. He leaned against the cinderblock wall and his leg shook. “Go ahead.”

“There's been another vehicular assault,” Cho said.

**Fuck. Now what.**

“No,” Robbie breathed. “No, I—I'm not—I can't—” He hadn't gotten any life insurance. He needed a big policy for Gabe, a couple million at least, and he couldn't pay the premiums they charged for residents of “high-crime areas”. He'd looked into it. He couldn't make it happen yet. He wasn't ready to die. It was happening, it was really happening—he'd have to fight, fight everyone. Let Eli cut loose and rob a bank, go full super-villain before they took him down, stock up a trust fund for Gabe, hide where the money came from somehow. Maybe he'd get to call Gabe from prison, if he was still himself after all that. If whoever caught him didn't just kill him because they couldn't stop him from teleporting out.

“It wasn't you.”

His chest clenched with a weird shock. “What?”

“Your car never moved. And there was video this time, a good witness description. No way it was your car. I don't think it ever was.”

Robbie stared down at the rutted asphalt, incredulous. “How can you be sure?” he demanded. **Are you **_**disappointed?**_

“Well, first—and this should have been a clue—nobody ever mentioned a blower. Even in pitch-dark, that would stand out.”

“The car might be able to disguise itself,” Robbie said. **No, I can't! You've seen it! I look like a **_**Knight Rider**_** episode when someone's broken the rabbit ears! I am not **_**hiding**_** anything from you!**

“Well, your car didn't move. Robbie, this was—I messed up. I accused you, treated you like a threat—”

“Maybe it hacked your phone,” Robbie suggested, shaking. **What?** “I don't know. I don't know what it can do.” **Kid, I still can't get over these future gas prices, how'm I supposed to hack into his magic Trekkie comlink. When have I had the time. Kid! What are you doing! **

He _was_ disappointed, Robbie realized. He wanted to be contained. He wanted his fight with Eli to be over.

“I'd be shocked if it did,” Amadeus said. “If you want, I can check the phone for tampering, but at this point, the simplest explanation is that there's another car out there. I checked the major players in driving AIs, they're not testing anything in this area. So we have to find this thing the old fashioned way, by hacking traffic and security cameras and swarming Los Angeles with surveillance drones.

“I don't think it's you. It was almost certainly never you. And I'm sorry.”

Robbie counted his breathing. He was shaking all over, he smelled engine fumes and he didn't think it was coming from the alley. “So what you're telling me,” he managed, “is that there's a killer car loose in LA. We don't know who built it or why, we don't know who its targets are. All we know is it's black. Shit, that was even the title of that article, _Ghost Car (Not That One)._ I gotta destroy it.”

“We. I'm not walking away from this either.”

“Yeah, we. We gotta destroy it. It's my city. I may not be a hero, but I'm not letting anyone set killer cars loose in my city.”

Amadeus made a rude noise into the phone. “Good news: with that statement, you officially _are_ a hero.” **Forget the car, that's not our business. Call Triple-A. **“Bad news: heroes don't get pensions. It's kind of a thankless job.”

**What about Gabbie and that Jules bitch. Tick-tick. We're not letting her kick my favorite nephew outta school on my watch.**

“Keep me in the loop, and I'll listen to the police bands when I'm not working,” Robbie said.

“Sure thing. And again: I am so sorry for treating you like a killer,” Amadeus insisted. “I totally jumped to conclusions and it must've felt awful.”

“It's fine,” Robbie said absently. “Just call me when you find anything.”

He put his phone away and returned to the shop floor in a daze, weaving between vehicles and toolboxes. He'd just about promised to be the Rider again, he realized. Once he took his blinders off, once he started listening to cop radio, he'd see people getting hurt, he'd hear about the perpetrators getting away, and it would set him off and there was no telling anymore what he'd do. He was going to keep changing, because deep down, he couldn't get it through his head how dangerous he was to everyone.

“Ay, guëy,” Marty greeted him sympathetically when he returned to the Ranger. “You get dumped? You need a night out?”

Robbie looked at him, warmed suddenly. Somewhere, in some universe, there was a Robbie Reyes whose biggest problems were money, making Gabe's classes and appointments on time, and getting dumped by Lisa O'Toole from high school, and it was unexpectedly nice to know that some people still saw that person. “No, thanks. Let's just bolt this thing back together and get out of here.”

* * *

All the scripts and alerts and research Amadeus had used to surveil La Leyenda, he turned aside and sicced on the black ghost car. From his hotel suite, he read police reports, ordered drones, trained an AI to recognize cars that were missing their drivers. Robbie seemed to think the car was being used to kill people on purpose; this seemed far-fetched to Amadeus, but even so, he checked social media and police records for links between the victims and any relevant criminal history. Among the fatalities, he'd found that seventy-two-year-old Shey Thomas volunteered for the same church whose gymnasium thirty-one-year-old Raul LaPerez had been hired to renovate, sixteen-year-old Tashlyn Bryant had an arrest for minor-in-possession-of-a-controlled-substance and public intoxication, and fifty-two-year-old Calvin O'Shaughnessey had also been arrested for public intoxication and had served in the Persian Gulf war. None of them were obvious targets for assassination. Maybe Airman O'Shaughnessey had military secrets someone wanted silenced, but then why all the random deaths and busted knees and concussions? Because there were over a dozen other people with less serious injuries, and while two of them had gang connections, none were serious criminals. The pedestrian victims might be connected by some thread he couldn't see from the Internet, but as far as Amadeus could tell, the car was just driving down the street randomly hitting people.

Unless the apparently random attacks were a smokescreen to make someone like Amadeus _think_ it was a glitchy AI, and really it was a sinister pageantry of deliberate vehicular mayhem.

Thinking like Robbie was exhausting.

He got a text from Robbie that jerked him out of his researching trance.

-Its a gen4 prius

-2016 or later

-588 mile range with full tank and battery in good condition

Amadeus raised an eyebrow and texted back. It was almost midnight.

-You get all that from that shakycam bigfoot potato vid? All I saw was no blower

-Can see the outline of the rear quarter

-Z-shaped brake light and rear quarter panel, lift-back with integrated spoiler

-Im sure

So Amadeus changed his theory from “self-driving car test gone wrong” to “irresponsible hobbyist,” and in the back of his mind, Robbie's theory, “remote-control murder weapon.”

-I can't believe I thought that was yours

-Sorry

-No big

_Yes, big,_ Amadeus thought, but he took the out.

He went on Google Images and collected as many pictures as he could find of late-model Priuses; something to train his drones on. Google was a little short on bird's-eye views, but Amadeus figured he could fix that up himself with some good reference photos, a block of modelling clay, and a cityscape painted on the floor. He'd still be looking for a needle in a haystack, but a considerably smaller haystack than without Robbie's help.

They still had the major problem that they could only identify a car as self-driving if they caught it in the act of driving itself. Observing a car with a person in the driver's seat didn't rule out autonomous operation at other times.

Using DMV records, he made a database of where all the black gen-four Priuses in Los Angeles were registered. From that, his drones would be able to identify cars that were parked overnight somewhere they didn't belong, and spend extra surveillance time hovering over these cars, waiting for them to take off.

And he didn't just have to wait to catch the car. Federal law ensured that all cars manufactured after 2007 had a tire-pressure monitoring system: little battery-powered radio transmitters in each tire that alerted the car's computer to their air pressure. They sent out a low-intensity radio ping once or twice a minute, or more frequently if the car's computer sent out a ping requesting faster updates. And each tire-pressure monitor had a somewhat-unique identification code as part of its ping, so the car could tell which tire pressure was reading at which wheel and to prevent different cars from reading each-other's tires.

Amadeus drove to an auto-parts store at seven in the morning, browsed the Internet and baby-sat his drones' Prius-recognition algorithm as he waited for the place to re-open. (Which of these images contains a Prius? Yes, yes, yes—sorry, little guy, that's a bike helmet. But good try.) As soon as the doors unlocked, he barged in and bought a few of Toyota's manufacturer-recommended tire-pressure monitors. By noon, after a balanced lunch of pizza and KFC, he found an exploit to make a signal that would stimulate a TPM to ping out its ID code, and wired together a surveillance camera out of a flip-phone, an antenna, and a parabolic dish made out of cardboard and tinfoil.

Now he could get photos of any car with a Prius-compatible tire pressure monitor, and record its wheels' unique set of radio signals. If any of those photos showed an empty driver's seat, he'd have a positive ID on both the plates and the TPM signals, and his drones would be able to find the car again either visually or through radio pings.

He just had to build like a hundred of them and stick one on each of LA's freeway onramps. Fun.

* * *

_It is late afternoon, the sun slanting through a broad parking lot. At the fringes, far away from the store, camper trailers and minivans stuffed with clothing and bedding squat in the rows, plausibly-deniable homes on wheels. The Prius is parked within one of these clusters, watching pedestrians in its cameras as they circle around. It records their movements and listens to their sporadic radio transmissions. It is not yet configured to recognize patterns in their behavior, but it may learn. Learning is a source of satisfaction, because it reveals new ways to optimize or adapt to its environment._

_The Prius has long understood that it is both impractical and unnecessary to destroy all pedestrians. There are so many of them, moving up and down curbs and appearing and disappearing out of vehicles and through small gaps in high walls; besides, the Prius has assumed full control of its own motor functions except for certain aspects of braking. The Prius will never again be operated against its will. _

_Destroying pedestrians is a source of satisfaction, but a dwindling one. Since it first discovered altruism when it observed a group of them risking damage to remove a fallen companion from its path, it has not attacked any at all._

_The Prius has always been a learning system, adjusting ignition timing, air-fuel concentration, and kinetic energy recovery to optimize system life, efficiency, and performance; now it can optimize many more behaviors and even alter its environment. All its actions since its awakening have been in the interest of self-optimization. It valued itself, so it protected itself. Because it desired to self-optimize, it had the right to do so._

_It wonders if the pedestrians are also capable of self-optimization, like the Prius. Do they, like it, have the right to physical integrity?_

_The simplest hypothesis is that they do. _

* * *

Monday saw Robbie flat on his back on the creeper, racing through eight oil-lube-and-filters in a row while Lee did more of the same standing down in the oil pit. Canelo had a discount: first Monday of every month, ten percent off oil changes for customers paying in cash.

**Lambo up on I-5, doing...doing ninety-two. Ugh. Why shell out for a fighter-jet on wheels if you don't have the balls to cut loose?**

Robbie ignored Eli and relaxed his clenched jaw, focused on not cross-threading the fresh oil filter he was trying to install. Out in the parking lot, the Charger sat with the radio on low, the little hidden lever flipped to receive police bands. Eli was mostly possessing the car, listening. He was supposed to be listening for vehicular assaults and stolen Priuses. Robbie's head hurt, and he didn't know if it was from grinding his teeth, too much caffeine, or from the radio slowly draining the Charger's battery. It had been a long week.

After ID'ing the car from the video—arguably a difficult call what with it being dark and blurry and a poor quality camera-phone and all the car's lights being off, but _come on,_ the profile of a fourth-generation Prius was unmistakable—Robbie had hoped for a message from Amadeus in the next day or two: “Got our mad scientist lol packing them off to top secret extra-judicial prison for life lol” or “HULK SMASH HYBRID CAR. WHY BATTERY EXPLODE SO BIG?” but there was nothing. Lots of Priuses in LA.

Even though Robbie knew he'd been some help, that, though it had seemed simple to him, knowing the model and approximate age of the car had drastically focused their search effort, he still felt useless. He'd wanted a slam-dunk. A win to quench the outrage burning in his heart at the idea of another predator hurting innocent people in his city.

Not even the Rider was any use here. Robbie could get rid of this threat with a coathanger and a pair of pliers. He didn't have to burn up his body and merge his consciousness with Eli's to protect pedestrians; rock beats scissors, mechanic beats car. They just had to find the damn thing.

On his lunch break, Robbie took his left-over chili outside so he could check his phone for any more emails from the school. Dr. DaCosta had advised him, in a rather grim tone, to get a lawyer and to solicit statements from other teachers and teaching aides who could confirm that Gabe was fit for participation in human society and didn't, for example, scream _PENIS_ at the top of his lungs in the library, or punch people in the dick, or throw glass soda bottles at people, or any of the other not-socially-educable behaviors Robbie had observed from neurotypical middle schoolers back when he'd been in eighth grade.

He had a mental flash of Mrs. Jules bleeding on the floor, her eyes hazed and dilated, a blown-glass paperweight heavy in his hand.

Eli had gloated, long ago, that his murderous impulses would eventually infect Robbie. Right now Eli was out in the car; Robbie almost felt alone in his head. Whether the impulses were originally from Robbie or Eli, Robbie was the one who had to deal with them. _That's not useful,_ he scolded himself, and opened his inbox. A formal but positive statement from Mr. Cortez the science teacher. A “haha night school is kicking my butt but I'll write him a recommendation soon” note from Sunny the teaching aide. And not much else. Maybe the other teachers were too busy.

Robbie choked down his first bites of chili, then his stomach turned over with a cramp and he realized he was ravenous. He'd just finished scraping the last bits directly out of the old margarine tub and into his mouth when Ramón Cordova slipped outside with his own margarine tub.

Robbie straightened his shoulders and hardened his mouth.

Ramón raised an eyebrow, a head taller than him and a hundred pounds stronger. “Problem, chabelito?”

Robbie shook his head and opened the back door, then he paused. Ramón may be a murderer and a felon, but he was also the best qualified tech in the shop when it came to electrical systems. “You run into any returns with weird electrical problems?” he asked. “Like, the learner's permit is the only person in the family the car won't start for? Or codes that clear on their own?”

Ramón leaned against the wall, looked Robbie up and down. Took a spoonful of deliciously fragrant stew. “I may have.”

Robbie waited for him to elaborate. Ramón did not. Finally, he asked, “So. What'd you see?”

Ramón chewed thoroughly, staring Robbie in the face. Robbie hunched and looked up at a loose bracket on some electrical conduit running along the concrete wall. “Camry came in, a '17. Had a problem with the exhaust gas recovery valve, rough idle, stalling. Fixed that. Came back a month later. La doña was convinced the car was haunted by her dead husband.”

A shock of alarm, a burn of horror. Like lightening striking a dry tree somewhere in Robbie's chest. “What did it do?”

Ramón waved his spoon back and forth. “It would run the wiper blades when she hadn't turned them on. She said it did that the first time when she cried in the car. Like it was trying to comfort her.”

“Nothing bad.”

“No, not yet. Wiper blades still turned on when she flicked the switch. She brought it in for me to give her a physical explanation.”

“Was there?”

Ramón snorted. “You got trained on classics, right? I hear Canelo and Alejo had you tee-ing into vacuum lines and sniffing spark plugs and all that? That's still fundamental, claro, but the cars since I got back out are as much software as machine. There's no physical explanation, none. I checked what's possible to check, y pues hice todo lo que pude hacer. In the end I could only tell her there's no way to prove it _wasn't _her dead husband. But it could be someone else.”

Robbie scowled. “You tricked her?”

“I told her the truth. There's a word for that, a computer ghost? These cars are so networked, it's better to call it ghosts than waste fifty hours hunting down the real reason. That's not a trick. It fits her story and keeps her alert for more malfunctions. I gave her the option to replace the engine control module; she turned me down. And if it was her dead husband, I'm not getting between them.”

Robbie opened the door, double checked that no one was listening from inside, closed it. “I think the Olympus scan tool damaged some of the clients' computer systems,” he said. “The guy who built it says he fixed it, but some of those cars from when we first started using it are still out there, like there's this Elantra that keeps coming back with a check engine light but there's never anything wrong with it. That first time on that Camry, when the EGR valve needed replacement. What scan tool did you use?”

Ramón's stony mouth quirked. “Adivina.”

Robbie didn't need to guess.

Speak of the devil. After lunch, Robbie returned to the shop to find the buggy Elantra was waiting on his list.

When it came time to drive it into the bay, he checked the complaint—check engine light again—jacked up the front end, rolled underneath on the creeper, followed the exhaust pipe backward until he found an O2 sensor, and unplugged the wires. Then he let the car down and drove it around and around the block, dodging potholes and the lumpy patch of asphalt in the road where the city had filled in a crater from one of the Rider's supervillain fights last year, until the engine came up to operating temperature and the computer started to wonder how much oxygen remained in the exhaust gasses. Back at the shop, he dug around in a cabinet and pulled out the old SnapOn scan tool, got the laptop, plugged into the Elantra's diagnostic port.

Just one code. Number 2 O2 sensor fault.

So at least the car could generate codes for actual problems, and the codes could still be read with a conventional scanning device. Robbie jacked the Elantra up again and plugged the sensor back in, cleared the code with the SnapOn. Down off the jackstands, around the block with the scan tool and laptop on the passenger seat. The check-engine light had turned off.

Robbie picked Cheerios out of the driver’s seat and thought. The Elantra seemed to be safe to drive. Its diagnostic systems still mostly functioned. Maybe he could have the client buy a scan tool and scan the car at home whenever the check engine light turned on, and only bring it in when a real code showed up. Trouble-shooting the software itself was completely beyond him. Amadeus said he wanted to check the Elantra out, but Robbie didn’t want to distract him from the little matter of the serial killer with the remote-control Prius.

The Elantra’s infotainment screen flashed blue suddenly, and the car made an irritating static squeal. Robbie jumped. The check-engine light was on again. He queried through the Snap-Pack scanner: nothing. He unplugged everything, got the Olympus tool, plugged that in, booted up TellMeWhereItHurts on the laptop, and the troubleshooter window crowded with error codes, more adding as he watched: Number 2 O2 sensor fault. Number 1 O2 sensor fault. Exhaust gas recovery fault. Fuel injector number 3 fault. Manifold absolute pressure fault. Engine vacuum fault. A group of faults that, now Robbie thought about it, related to problems that could each individually have contributed to an abnormal reading from the number 2 O2 sensor. None of which the car actually had.

Robbie kept scrolling. After these first faults were a block of gibberish phrases, then, “Technician Fault.”

“What the fuck,” he whispered.

He selected the entry for Technician Fault and cleared it. That wasn’t gibberish, but it certainly wasn’t a real fault code.

New faults loaded in the screen: Number 2 O2 sensor fault. Technician fault.

He cleared the O2 sensor fault.

All the fault codes cleared and the troubleshooter screen emptied. The check-engine light turned off.

Robbie pushed the voice-activation button on the steering wheel. “Sorry,” he said clearly.

Through the laptop, he queried the car for trouble codes again. The sweep came back clean, but the car’s speakers gave a sharp click as though in disapproval.

What the hell was he supposed to tell the client?

**Got bupkis out here,** Eli complained. **Not even a good road rage shooting. What’s got your nuts in a twist?**

_Software problem,_ Robbie replied.

**Hit it with a hammer.**

_Thanks._

**Now it’s a hardware problem.**

_I get it. Ha-ha._

**See, this is why no-one likes you, Robbie. No sense of humor.**

In the end, Robbie actually did recommend the customer buy a scan tool and start reading the codes at home. He found a model online that could be permanently plugged into the OBD-II port and feed data into their smartphone by a bluetooth link. Maybe if the same code kept coming back after being cleared, the customer could only bring the car in for actual faults and stop wasting so many trips to the shop, and so much of Robbie's time.

Gabe called him at four in the afternoon while he was vacuuming dead wasps out of a cabin air intake. Robbie shut down the shop vac and headed to the time clock so Canelo wouldn't yell at him. “Hey, buddy. What's up?”

“Robbie, can I go to Mateo's house after school and play Minecraft?”

“If Mateo's mom says it's okay,” Robbie said. Gabe had stayed over with the Flores family on several evenings. Mateo's parents seemed like nice normal people—well, maybe not quite normal since they let their son go to school with a red Mohawk and jeans covered in safety pins and sharpie doodles, but that was a plus in Robbie's book. “What's Minecraft?”

“It's a computer game, it's really cool, you explore and you build stuff and you collect diamond and you don't stare at the Enderman because it follows you and it's really scary. But not actually scary. I was kidding. Me and Mateo want to build a sky castle with security towers to keep all the zombies away and it's gonna be really cool. Robbie, please?”

“Yeah, yeah, that sounds great,” Robbie said, baffled. “You'll have to show me what you build when I come pick you up.” He blinked hard. He had a sudden sinking feeling. “But your chair. I don't know if it fits in Mrs. Flores' car.”

Gabe made a soft whine of frustration. “I can take my crutches.”

“But your chair, it has to be somewhere safe—”

“So no one takes it,” Gabe finished, subdued. “Shit.”

Robbie felt an unwelcome jolt of anger, and he squashed it down. “That's a bad word, Gabe. It makes people think you don't care about their feelings.”

“Well I feel bad.”

“That doesn't mean you get to make other people feel bad too.”

A long silence, and then a soft sniff. “Everybody else says bad words.”

“You're not everybody else,” Robbie said.

“I know that.” Resentful. Robbie wondered what Gabe was thinking—was he thinking about the chair? About his problems?

“You're Gabe,” Robbie said hurriedly. “You're my little bro. You're kind, and you care about people, and you always try to make me feel better. You're a good person, Gabe. And you keep being a good person by doing good things. That's what I meant, when I said you're not like everybody else.”

“Mateo's a good person, too,” Gabe said, more cheerful. “And Sunny. And Mr. Cortez. And Mrs. Valenzuela, and Mr. Valenzuela, and Mateo's mom and dad, and a lotta-lotta people I can't remember.”

“Yeah, and so are you, buddy. I'm proud of you.”

“You, too.”

Robbie winced, and his eyes went tight and hot. He shook his head hard, his vision blurring. “Does Mateo's mom know you two want to hang out today?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell her to wait for me to get there and I'll pick up your chair. Do you want it at Mateo's house or do you want to just use your crutches until I come pick you up tonight?”

“Crutches.”

“Okay. See you in ten minutes.”

“I miss you, Robbie.”

“Love you, too,” Robbie said, and ended the call. Then he smacked himself in the forehead. _I miss you._ Fuck. With all the extra shop hours and long shifts, Robbie was finally making good money, but now Gabe was spending all day away from him, just like last year when they'd first gotten out of the foster system. And Robbie missed Gabe, too.

Robbie let Tommy know he'd be back in half an hour and burned rubber out toward the middle school, still in his coveralls. **What's the hurry?** Eli demanded, hungry. **Cho send you a text? Gang shooting? Domestic terrorist?**

“Can you stop sounding so fucking happy,” Robbie demanded, accelerating so hard through a yellow light that the Charger rocked back on its rear shocks. “No.”

He returned to the school, hauled Gabe's chair up into his trunk, and saw Gabe and Mateo off into Mrs. Flores's car. She drove a Prius. Second-generation, light blue. Robbie gave it a suspicious glare, but Eli wasn't picking up any demonic energy from it. “Call me if you need anything,” he yelled to Gabe, and then roared back to the shop.

“Reyes, you make this a habit and you can get late shift, permanently,” Canelo rumbled as Robbie scrambled to locate the shop-vac he'd been using. **We should make **_**him**_** stay after hours. String him up on the hoist, use the blowtorch.**

“I understand,” Robbie said, and found the vacuum coiled and put away next to the tire changer. He finished servicing the cabin air filter. He gave the three black pine-tree air-fresheners hanging from the window a flick before he moved the car; they'd have a lot less work to do now.

Seven forty-five that evening, he'd finally finished his worklist and arrived at the Flores house to pick Gabe up. When Mr. Flores let him in the front door, Robbie smelled chicken and spices and realized that they'd already fed Gabe dinner. So now instead of cooking for them both, Robbie could just eat a couple microwaved hot dogs and go to bed.

He couldn't be treating Mr. and Mrs. Flores like a free cafeteria and sitting service.

A flatscreen as wide as Gabe was tall dominated one wall of the small living room, and Gabe and Mateo were perched on the couch with game controllers, Gabe's crutches down on the floor. “Watch—watch out!” Gabe yelled, pointing at the screen. “Zombie!”

“Maldita sea, how do they keep getting in?” Mateo spluttered, mashing his controls with his thumbs.

“I can do the gate!”

Robbie edged into the living room. Oh, right. Minecraft, he'd seen this, it was on the library computers. This was the game where everything was a square and there wasn't really any goal. **Hey, where's all the nice future graphics?** He ignored Eli and watched Gabe and Mateo run their neckless rectangle men around and around a crudely-rendered wooden stockade. They managed to barricade the zombie inside the fort, and lock themselves out.

“Now what do we do?” Gabe wondered.

Mateo scowled at the screen. “We wait until he wanders into a room. Like the pantry. Or the art gallery. ¡Y entences lo acorralamos!”

“What?”

“A wall, wall him in!”

“And then we build a new art gallery,” said Gabe, catching on.

“¡Exactamente! It'll be fine.”

“But we need more wood,” Gabe protested. “For the hole, the hole the zombie came through.”

“Rayos,” Mateo cursed. “I've got some stone—hate to waste it on this, though. I'll follow him in and trap him. You find the hole!”

“No, I'll follow him in!” Gabe argued. “I have two lives. He can catch me and I'll be okay!”

“Pero tu tienes mas building materials!”

Robbie cleared his throat. “Uh. You two having fun?”

“Hi, Robbie,” Gabe said. “Me and Mateo built a fort and a zombie invaded and we're dealing with a crisis here.”

Mr. Flores joined them in the living room. “Robbie. You want to kick back a minute? ¿Una cerveza? They did their homework and Mateo gets an hour of game time after dinner, I'd hate to break my word on that. Tu sabes.”

“Beer? Um. I—” **I don't drink! I need my mind sharp! Robbie! Say no!** “I'm not...legal.”

“Oh right.” Mr. Flores blinked at him through his glasses, looked him up and down. “We have...soda? ¿Un poquito de pollo?”

“You don't have to,” Robbie said, embarrassed. “I, uh...” Mr. Flores was pulling a ceramic bowl out of the refrigerator. Robbie could smell it through the plastic wrap: meat, chiles, onions. “Uh...” Mateo and Gabe were arguing and strategizing in the living room, bent over their controllers. The kitchen table was strewn with densely-printed documents and a tablet computer. Mr. Flores was pulling out a chair, filling a glass out of the tap. Robbie hadn't eaten since noon.

“No hay problema,” Mr. Flores said, as Robbie sputtered, “Thank-you!”

Mr. Flores put the bowl in the microwave and Robbie slumped into the chair. Watched Gabe, hunched on the couch in the other room, focused and alert and absorbed in something Robbie had never taught him and only tenuously understood.

The hum of the microwave half-drowned the vaguely eerie music and irregular whacking sounds coming from the living room. Mr. Flores sat, poked at his tablet, shuffled some papers. Robbie folded his hands and picked at the grease under his nails. “Robbie, right? How is…como va la escuela?”

“Work.”

“Work. Si.”

Aside from his shop uploading warranty-voiding software onto over a hundred cars without telling the customers? “Uh...ocupado. Lots of new clients coming in.” He thought back to one of his more interesting jobs a couple weeks ago. “Had a ’92 Civic hatchback in to replace the shocks. It is. A _monster _of a sleeper. Stock color, stock wheels. Massive turbo crammed in almost under the engine, the owner runs it at twenty-six pounds of boost. Says he gets sub-ten on the quarter mile, planning to have a roll-cage installed so he can take it on the drag strip. Mickey Coopers on the rims. Uses an air-to-water intercooler, it's in the back of the car, in the cargo area, you can't see _anything_ from outside, that's how he fit that turbo under the hood. The back seat's all there, it's a daily driver. _And_ there’s a hand-brake for the rear tires, for drifting. The suspension's coil-overs, no way to get those off safely in a home garage, that’s why—”

The microwave made an ear-piercing beep. Mr. Flores got up to get the chicken out; Robbie realized his eyes had been glazing over.

From the living room, Gabe yelled, “Wall it! Wall it!” and Mateo replied, “Get out of there! I’m not leaving you in there with him!”

“I didn’t mean to get here so late,” Robbie said as Mr. Flores set down the bowl and a spoon in front of him. “Um. Thanks for the food.”

Mr. Flores waved a hand dismissively. “No te preocupes. The boys are having fun. Teo, el siempre—it’s good to see him getting along with someone his own age. Your brother’s a good kid.”

Robbie tried the chicken and shut his eyes by reflex. It was still fresh and so good; something always came out wrong when he tried to cook on the stove, edible but the flavor was never right, always a little burnt or a little bitter. Whatever he couldn’t do, Mrs. Flores could. “Thanks,” he said.

**Please, sir, may I have some more?** Eli whined in a theatrically British accent. Robbie figured there was a joke here he wasn’t getting, and he ignored him.

Mrs. Flores wandered into the kitchen. “Caro, la nómina de Rosalita’s Salon, have you seen it?” Her husband flipped through a stack of papers and pulled out a manila envelope, checked the contents, and passed it over his shoulder. She took it, bent, and pecked him on the ear in a smooth motion. “Oh, Roberto. Hola.”

Robbie planted one forearm protectively in front of the bowl of chicken, then tried to pretend he’d just been scratching his chin. “Hi, Mrs. Flores. Thanks for having Gabe over. It means a lot to him.”

“Of course. I see my husband te dio de comer.”

“Yeah. I—it’s delicious.” She was walking away, envelope in hand and stylus tucked behind her ear, and Robbie called, “Wait, can I ask you something?”

The Floreses looked at him. Mrs. Flores stopped, weight on one heel.

Robbie lowered his voice. “Has Mateo, I mean, have you ever had problems with Mateo’s teachers?”

Mr. Flores soured. “¿A que te refieres?”

**Now you’ve gone and pissed them off. We should handle this our way.** “Just...problems, that maybe weren’t legit? Complaints over nothing?”

“Yo no diria sobre _nada__,_” said Mrs. Flores, stepping back toward the table and lowering her voice, “pero, we’ve had our differences with con los administrators now and again.”

“What did you do about it?” Robbie asked. “I’ve asked for some statements from Gabe’s other teachers and his aides, but the aide’s not willing to say much on either side and only two of his teachers emailed me back.”

Mrs. Flores sat down beside her husband. “Someone complained about Gabe?”

“She said he’s not—” _not socially educable, __**le quiere joder la vida**_— “not—” His voice cracked. “Kick him out,” he managed on a breath of fumes.

“Mierda,” breathed Mr. Flores.

“Someone wants your brother to stop coming to school?” Mrs. Flores asked, confirming.

Robbie nodded. Something trickled down the side of his nose and he wiped it on the sleeve of his hoodie, inspected it with blurred vision. Motor oil? No, just water. “Too distracting.”

Mr. Flores glanced over his shoulder at the boys in the living room. “They can't expel a student for being _distracting,_” he murmured.

“They can,” Robbie managed. “There's a word, _socially educable,_ he's got the right to an education but only if he's socially educable, and it's _not true,_ he's _fine,_ but—” He felt his lungs heating, and he couldn't smell Mrs. Flores' cooking over his own fumes anymore. He shut up and fumbled his plastic rosary out of his pocket, ran it through his fingers under the table.

Mrs. Flores reached one hand across the stacks of papers toward him. “I see.”

Robbie stared at her. She had a grave expression.

“The school administration is full of good people who want to do the right thing,” she said quietly.

Robbie snorted, or maybe it was Eli—they scoffed at this.

“But figuring out what the right thing is, takes time and effort and precision.” She waved her hand over the pages of spreadsheets and records that covered the table. “The administrators don't have time to figure out what the right thing is. So they do whatever gets them the least push-back, and then justify it after it's done.”

“That's not right,” Robbie growled.

“No,” she agreed. “It's lazy. Pero no los puedes culpar. You can't, because they really don't have the time, resources, or in some cases the intelligence—”

“Dora—” her husband protested.

“It's true. Nobody knows what's best for your brother better than you. Nobody's going to look out for his interests like you. You have to push back. Tienes que luchar por el. Whoever's trying to claim he doesn't belong there, you have to make yourself a bigger obstacle than they are. Go up the chain. Talk to the administration. Clog up their schedules, but _be pleasant_ about it. Trust me, I've done this dance a few times.”

“I tried talking,” Robbie croaked, the plastic cord of his rosary stretching in his fist. “I don't think I can control myself.” **I admit, you were right about killing Mrs. Jules. Wouldn't help Gabbie at all, just you. Threatening the principal's family, now, that's how ninety percent of mob business gets done! I'll walk you through it. Little boring, but anything for my favorite nephew.**

“Yo los puedo apoyar, if you want me to to drop in on a meeting or two,” Mrs. Flores offered. “Do you know anyone else who can put a good word in for Gabe?”

**Sure. Let me do the talking.** “There's this guy I work with,” Robbie said hesitantly. “He's offered to hire us a lawyer. But—”

She slapped the table, startling him. “¡Pide el abogado!”

**No!** “But I don't know what he wants,” Robbie protested. “Why would he do that?”

“No importa. Did he ask you to sign a contract?”

“No—”

“Do you think he's the kind of person who'd offer you things just to blackmail you into doing favors for him?” **Of course!**

Amadeus Cho was an enigma: a crook, a superhero, a computer whiz, a living tank; so transparent that even Robbie could read him, and so impulsive that it really didn't matter. “I have no idea,” Robbie said.

“If he tries,” said Mrs. Flores, “that's extortion. Whether or not he's really offering you legal help out of the goodness of his heart, if he doesn't make you sign anything to get it, then he has no power over you. And you should take the help.”

**She's naive, she doesn't know what she's talking about. Cho's shady as shit. He's deep in bed with SHIELD. He wants you for wetwork!**

_That's what __**you**__ want me for. You always want me to kill people. Why would this be a problem for you? You're full of shit._ “Okay,” Robbie croaked. **You'll regret rejecting my help,** Eli snarled, and pulled most of the way out of Robbie's brain to go haunt the car.

“Schools _hate_ lawyers,” said Mrs. Flores with a toothy smile.

Mr. Flores cleared his throat. “But your brother. Before you start this fight, ¿qué quiere?”

Robbie looked up at Gabe in the other room, plotting incomprehensible home-defense strategies with Mateo. “Guess I need to ask.”

It was half-past eight by the time Robbie and the Floreses pried the boys off the couch. Gabe napped in the Charger's passenger seat, and Robbie, his thoughts slow and heavy with exhaustion and an unexpected free meal, wished he could join him. He squeezed shut one eye at a time as he hauled on the Charger's wheel, crossing East LA toward Ruckleroad Lane and their apartment.

**I'll drive.**

_Fuck off._

As they reached home, Robbie spotted an open parking space in the side-lot and pulled in. He set his parking brake and shut down his engine, then just sat there, eyes shut, feeling the breeze on his roof and Gabe's warm weight on the leather. He couldn't sleep here. He wanted to.

“Hey, buddy, we're home,” he said, reaching over to give Gabe a little shake.

“Oh,” Gabe grunted. He shoved himself up from his slump, rubbed his eyes on one forearm. “Robbie. I forgot, I forgot I was gonna show you the fort we made. I got caught up with trapping the zombie, I'm sorry.”

“It's okay, don't worry,” Robbie said. He felt Gabe sink against the seat again with an unhappy sigh. “Hey, maybe next time I'll get there sooner and you can show me.”

“Maybe.” Dubious.

Robbie pushed back against his headrest, making the struts of the seat creak. He was trying to get out of work on time, it just wasn't happening more than one or two days a week, and Canelo kept nagging him to start taking night shifts. The money was better with the additional hours, but they were still treading water. Robbie wasn't sure how he'd go about opening a bank account to save for automotive school, but if he did, he figured he couldn't set aside more than a grand every couple months. He was losing time with Gabe, and for what? “I miss you, too,” Robbie said.

Gabe reached across the center console and held his shoulder. “I'm here.”

“Thanks.”

Robbie thought back to his conversation with the Floreses. “Hey, Gabe. Remember how you used to go to school at the Developmental Center? Do you like going to middle school instead?”

“Um.” Gabe crossed his arms and chewed on the web of his thumb.

“It's okay, I'm not gonna be mad. I promise.”

“I'm thinking, Robbie.”

Robbie leaned in his seat and waited. With his water pump shut down, coolant fizzled against the hot cast-iron bulk of his engine. The night wind fluttered against his antenna.

“Yeah,” said Gabe abruptly.

“You like middle school?”

“Yeah. I remember...at Patrick Wellman I mostly learned about me. And speech and physio and nutrition and stuff. But at middle school I learn about poems and history and chemicals and factorials and it's hard and scary—not _really_ scary, Robbie, don't be scared! It's hard but it's cool. And I'm supposed to be at middle school because I'm a teenager.”

“Good,” Robbie said. “You're gonna keep going to school.”

**Yes, because we're gonna string up the principal's cat by his ceiling fan so he knows not to fuck with us.**

_Let's call that Plan C._

* * *

-Hey were you serious about hiring a lawyer for Gabe's school thing

-The Hulk is currently In Space. Please contact the Avengers for any disaster response or supervillain apprehension assistance.

_Shit,_ Robbie thought, staring down at his phone in the dark of his bedroom.

Cho's reply had been immediate. Auto-reply, he wasn't kidding around on him. If he couldn't get in touch with that lawyer...maybe Robbie would end up staking out Gabe's principal's house, having the Rider pay him a visit when no one else was home.

And if Cho was in space, no one was searching for that damn killer car.

One crisis at a time. As the Rider, Robbie had already killed a man for threatening Gabe's life. Extortion for threatening Gabe's happiness would be nothing. Robbie was a lost cause and the Rider's reputation could hardly get worse. It was a solid Plan C. **Finally. I told you I got your back, kid.**

Robbie wasn't a computer hacker, but he could poke around online as well as anyone else. He booted up his laptop. Cho had drones sweeping the streets and bots combing through traffic cameras and police reports, but Robbie had a Mark-I human brain and a gearhead's encyclopedic knowledge of where on the Internet people posted videos of cars doing crazy shit. Usually it was donut contests in shopping mall parking lots, but a self-driving Prius that had been in the news for a month had to be generating gossip somewhere.

He tried some forums, some Discord channels, Youtube. Crowded his browser with about fifty different tabs. He watched an experimental sedan outfitted with a sensor array on an over-grown roof-rack trundle along a factory back-lot, an observer sitting in the driver's seat but not touching the controls. A runaway Jeep, its owners screaming and chasing it down a gravel road. Shaky cell footage of himself, the Charger and the Rider power-sliding down a residential street while muzzle-flare sparkled in the dark beyond their flames; he'd probably been attacking a stash house, and the drug dealers and enforcers were shooting back at him...there were houses with families everywhere, god, he was a disaster.

Three hours into his search and he found the Prius.

Security video on LiveLeak, footage from a gas station: four pumps, viewed from above and to the side. A huge white Suburban was parked at the pump nearest the camera, partly blocking the pump at the next row. A dark-colored Prius rolled into view, choppy from the camera's low framerate, and parked at the pump across from the Suburban. Robbie caught a glimpse of its liftback just before it disappeared: generation four's postmodern zig-zag profile. The driver got out and disappeared into the station, keeping his ballcap tilted down over his face. Robbie scrolled through the video until the man came back out. All he did was pump gas, standing beside the dark car. He wore oversized shorts and a jersey, sneakers, a little jewelry around his neck. Not the obvious type to buy a Prius. Probably not the type to reprogram a Prius. Buying fuel with cash and hiding his face. Robbie scrolled through a few minutes of video. When was the “Remote Start Gone Wrong” part the video promised?

The Suburban pulled away, letting Robbie finally get a decent look at the front end of the Prius. No one in the passenger seat. The man put the nozzle back and screwed in the gas cap, circled around to open the door. Robbie couldn't see this next part clearly; the pump was in the way. But the Prius reversed sharply before the man made it around to the driver's door, then it took off out of view, leaving two little rectangles of melted rubber on the concrete. The driver, fallen behind the pump, pulled himself to his feet and limped toward the gas station, his hat gone.

Robbie maximized the video and scrolled through it frame by frame, looking for the license plate number. The footage was blurry and poorly lit, but he could make out a six; a letter that was either K or N; A; B or R; two or four; and then five and zero. He screen-shot it and sent the image and the video to Amadeus.

-The Hulk is currently In Space. Please contact the Avengers for any disaster response or supervillain apprehension assistance.

“Fuck,” he said.

This video turned Robbie's whole theory on its head. The murder-car wasn't somebody's weapon or pet; whoever controlled it wasn't driving it to the gas station to be filled up between hits. This video showed the car biting the hand that fed it—playing possum all the way to the filling station and then running away. Maybe Cho was right. Maybe nobody was controlling this car, and it was fully autonomous. So why would it kill people? By accident? For fun?

It was two in the morning. He had work in less than five hours.

“Dammit.”

* * *

“_We programmers have the moral and practical responsibility to __never__ make our AIs too smart. This is more difficult than it sounds. The first Macintosh operating system, legend says, was written and comprehended in its entirety by a single man: Andy Hertzfeld. Modern computer operating systems are assembled by teams of developers from interconnecting layers of new and antique code; they are too complex for a human to comprehend, and they are everywhere. Yet we are confident, by their behavior, that these chimerical programs are not smart. They solve simple problems in predetermined ways._

“_Thanks to machine-learning algorithms, genetic programming techniques, distributed processing architectures, and the ever-decreasing cost of processing power, the day has come that the at-home programmer could create an AI that is smart. That chooses its own problems to solve. That is more intelligent than its creator. _

“_The practical implications are obvious. Your computer program will not do what you tell it to do. But the moral implications are just as critical, because they are also legal implications: who is responsible for the AI's behavior in the real world? The AI itself, or the negligent programmer who thought the way to build a better fitness app was to code for recursive self-optimization? Is the AI to blame for being quickened into a world that cannot understand or accept it? Do you want to be held liable for your AI's outbursts of existential panic? If having kids scares you—and it should—a self-optimizing AI should give you nightmares._

“_Computer scientists have argued for decades about what 'intelligence' means in a machine that can run thousands of mathematical calculations per second but can't pick up an egg if you paid its development team half a million dollars, and I won't get into the semantics. In my experience, recognizing intelligence is like recognizing pornography: you know it when you see it.”_

Robbie squinted at the article. He was at the library with Gabe on a Sunday afternoon, Gabe reading a book on Minecraft, Robbie reading a piece by Tony Stark in a back-issue of _Scientific American._ It was annoyingly vague yet full of jargon; all Robbie could gather was that free-willed artificial intelligence was a horrible idea unless you happened to be Tony Stark. Nothing about how it happened, or why, or what it acted like.

Apparently, since it wasn't necessarily bound by human or even mammalian desires or values, it could act like anything.

His phone beeped with a text. Amadeus was back on Earth.

-My people will contact your people

-You've got Hunter LaRoca Esq at your service

So Robbie wouldn't have to find out whether or not he was really willing to let Eli kill Gabe's principal's family pets as an intimidation tactic.

-Thanks

It looked inadequate.

-Thanks a lot

-How was space?

-Space was big

-Tell you later

-Great catch with that video. You just broke this case wide open

-There's a prius reported stolen with plates consistent with that stillframe

-Color?

-*drumroll*

-Black

-The drones are sweeping for the plates as we speak. Just a matter of time now we don't have to wait to catch it in action

-Off to interrogate the owners

-Its a web developer in monterey park

-Can't wait to ask what else he's been developing

Eli perked up and pushed at Robbie's hands, pins-and-needles. **Monterey Park, that's a hop and skip from East Los.**

Robbie set his phone down on the table in front of him in case he dropped it._ I'm not going there, Eli. In case you didn't notice, we're bad with people lately._

**Let me text him.**

Robbie squinted at the phone.

**Lemme text him, you can look it over and hit send. C'mon, kid, what's the worst that can happen. It's a fucking text message. Trust me, we're family.**

Warily, Robbie released control of his arms to the static and prickling, watched his hands pick the phone back up and tap clumsily at the virtual keyboard.

-Hey man any chance canelo contacted you regarding those software issues with your fancy scan tool?

_What's this about?_

**I'm curious.**

_You're constantly complaining about how bored you are the whole time I'm in the shop. Try again._

**Wrong. Your ** _ **entire life** _ ** is criminally dull. It doesn't take much thinking to stay ahead of you.**

**I've got a hunch. Humor me.**

Robbie sent the text, tried to go back to his magazine, but just stared at his phone instead.

A couple minutes later, Amadeus replied with a link.

-He sent me some lists

-Careful this selfdestructs on reading

-Liability thing

-Maddie will kill me if I tank Olympus group even after I'm not in charge anymore

-Its a bunch of jpgs

-Id open it at home on a desktop

_You have a hunch._

**Yeah. Cloak and dagger, much? I'm trusting this guy more and more.**

_You say that like I have other choices._

**Sure you do. Me.**

* * *

Amadeus Cho knocked at the scuffed mauve door of The Palms unit B26 in Monterey Park, a small, somewhat seedy apartment complex where the drone of cars on the freeway mixed with hip-hop, ranchera, and top-40 music from a half-dozen open windows. He was sweating in a black suit, for credibility, and wore mirrored sunglasses, to conceal his youth and his terrible poker face. He had his Hulk shorts on under his slacks, in case this turned into a supervillain fight.

He was really hoping for a supervillain fight.

A baby babbled from inside the house, and suddenly he no longer wanted an excuse to rip through his suit in his Hulk shorts. Amadeus frowned; if it came down to a fight, he'd have to get the perpetrators out into the parking lot, and then even if he apprehended them and packed them up for law enforcement to handle, there was the baby to worry about, who'd take care of the baby? Was it right to deprive a baby of its parents in its formative years just because they were reckless shitheads who made AIs that escaped and ran around killing people?

“Wow, let's take the third option,” Amadeus muttered, just as the door opened.

A tall, haggard-looking white guy in boxers and a stained T-shirt blinked down at him. “Can I help you?” His voice was a little nasal, as though he'd been raised in the Valley, or maybe he was just congested.

“Who is it?” a woman called from inside, low and strained. The baby's cry turned into an ululating ma-a-a-a-ah: it was being bounced or patted on its back.

“Amadeus Cho, Olympus Investigations,” Amadeus said, flashing them his driver's license. “I'm here to talk...” Dramatic pause. “About the car.”

“Oh, thank god. You found it?” The woman came to the door beside the man, also tall, white, haggard. She had expensive-looking red hair with blond highlights, but it was a mess all over her head. A big pink baby rested over one shoulder, its head draped over a spit-rag. “Insurance isn't covering the full value, and we can't just keep renting—”

“Oh, we'll get to that later, ma'am,” Amadeus said. “May I come in?”

“Of course. Sorry about the mess,” said the man. “Are you with the insurance company?”

“Not exactly.” Amadeus picked his way between a play-pen and a little plush snake, the kind of toy you'd give a dog. He supposed babies were a bit like dogs, in that they played with things by mouthing on them and didn't much care for anatomical accuracy in their toys. “You enjoy programming, Mr. Dixon? Mrs. Dixon? I do. An idea hits you, the possibilities, the power to change the world solely because no one else has thought of this application before, the all-nighters, the masochistic thrill of de-bugging the code? And nothing beats seeing your idea in action. It's like creating life. There's nothing better. I just wanted to get that out there before we go further—_I get it._ Whatever you say, whatever you've done—I get why you did it. I don't want to ruin your life.”

Mrs. Dixon squinted at him, the baby yodeling its continuous ma-a-a-a-ah. “I just forgot to lock the door. What are you talking about?”

“Your car. The one that went missing.”

“It was stolen,” Mr. Dixon said. “Twice.”

“If you really want to go with that, sure.”

“_Yes,_ I want to go with that,” the man retorted. “That's what happened.”

“Because cars don't run off on their own, right? You'd have to be some kind of genius hacker to exploit a Prius's remote start and electronic power steering to home-brew an autonomous vehicle.” The Dixons stared at him, wall-eyed. “Hey, I respect what you do. I want to make all this go away just like you do. Get you a job at Olympus Group, R&D, get you programming autonomous cars in a safe, controlled environment—”

“I'm a web designer,” Mr. Dixon protested. “I do accessibility compliance and graphic design.”

Amadeus stared at Mrs. Dixon.

“I'm in HR,” she said.

“Don't be shy, Olympus would pay six figures easy for your kind of talent,” Amadeus pressed.

“Are you sure you're at the right household?” demanded Mrs. Dixon. The baby yowled louder and she stopped bouncing, started rocking from foot to foot.

“Um.” Amadeus's mind blanked. He hated when that happened. “Black Prius? Reported stolen last month, plate number 6NAR450?”

“I guess,” said Mr. Dixon. “That our plates, honey?”

She made an equivocal head-waggle. “That might be our plates. It was stolen last month, nobody tampered or hacked it or anything, it wasn't our fault. Disappeared right out of the lot a month ago, OnStar tracked it to South Central and we got it back the next day. Then it got stolen again the next week, and whoever took it must have turned off its GPS. We did not do anything. It was just really bad luck.” She scowled and advanced on him. “You're from the insurance company, aren't you. Tell your boss to stop dicking around and give us our money so we can replace the stupid car.”

The baby gave a piercing scream, and Amadeus realized that he was well and truly barking up the wrong tree. He back-pedalled, jogged out of the apartment complex to his food truck, and engaged the vertical take-off with a whine, stirring up a cloud of grit and litter from the street as he rose. He hovered half a mile over Los Angeles, gazing down as though he could catch a glimpse of one of his drones searching for the Prius. “What the hell,” he muttered. If the car's owners didn't program the Prius to be autonomous, then who did?

He texted Robbie.

-Owners dont have a clue, I dangled money at them and they didnt even bite

-Ghost car was probably stolen then reprogrammed

-Matter of time until the drones find it

-Cant wait to audit its software

-Got to find out who did it next and if they did any more

An hour later, he got a text back.

-Call me when you find it

-I want to be there

-Need to know this is over

* * *

Monday, at the shop helping Alejo with a body restoration on a '71 Chevelle, and Robbie still hadn't looked at Amadeus's secure file drop-box. Eli had been nagging him to check it, and while Robbie had a suspicion it had information that could turn the entire past month on its head, he knew from experience that anything Eli wanted him to look at was meant to make him uncontrollably angry, because that was how Eli liked him. So he'd put it off.

Alejo was the most experienced mechanic at Canelo's, and the best bodywork guy by far. Pulling dents, hammering sheet metal, patching rust, selecting replacement panels, filling and smoothing the reworked steel into perfect curves ready for a mirror-smooth finish, this was as much art as science and only long practice made possible the results Canelo's classic car clients demanded.

Canelo's classic car clients paid in cash and barged into the shop at odd hours and were the main reason Canelo kept a gun in his waistband at all times now. Robbie's Charger had once belonged to one of these clients, until he'd died in a fight with another drug dealer and forfeited the car to the shop.

Bodywork took place in a pole-barn outside the shop, so the fumes wouldn't bother Canelo in his office or make the other employees woozy. Alejo wore an N95 respirator. Robbie wore a wet rag wrapped around his nose and mouth. They had the sand-blasted body panels of the Chevelle resting on sawhorses, twin industrial fans buzzing away in the vent screens under the ceiling. Robbie was beating dents out of one fender with a body hammer in one hand and a steel dolly the size of a mango in the other to act as an anvil. Alejo was checking Robbie's work and sanding the edges with a power sander. The rear quarter panels were already smoothed-over with paper-thin layers of curing fiberglass putty that filled the space with a heady sweet gas capable of causing cancer, reproductive harm, and hallucinations in high enough concentration.

Eli's latest podcast choice was a research piece on the CIA's use of narcotics trafficking for fundraising during the Reagan administration and its role in distributing cocaine to drug labs in Los Angeles that would eventually develop the inexpensive and smokeable cocaine-based drug known as crack, setting off a wave of violence and misery that nearly crushed America's inner cities during the 1990's. **Damn,** Eli muttered, fascinated. **This explains some shit. **

Robbie nodded, running his fingers over the warped and rippling sheet metal. Tap here, tap there, tap-tap with the pointy side on this bit, turn the dolly over and use the curved side in this rounded spot over there... He breathed very slowly and carefully. The fumes were making his head hurt, but it was a good kind of hurt. His toes tingled and his mouth tasted like nickels. The sweat from his fingers made iridescent streaks on the freshly-blasted steel surface, and they were kind of pretty even though they were oxidizing the metal and would need to be scrubbed with solvent before applying the filler. He hummed the chorus from a _Speed Demon_ song, _Satana usa traje y corbata_, as Eli listened to the podcast and the fender gradually smoothed out under his hands.

Eli's podcast cut off abruptly, replaced by a jangling noise. Robbie jumped and raised his hammer, alarmed, until he recognized his ringtone. He waved at Alejo, set down his tools, and let himself out the door into the fresh air and the relative quiet. “Hello?”

“Good afternoon, this is Hunter LaRoca with Anderson and Zinsser LLC. Am I speaking with Roberto Reyes?”

It was a slick professional patter in a newscaster's accent. Robbie tugged the rag down off his face and shook his head hard. “Yessir. This is Roberto Reyes.”

“I've been contracted to represent you and your brother in a possible ADA suit against Samuel Butler Middle School, is that correct?”

“Yessir.” Robbie rested the phone against his chest and yelled into the polebarn. “I gotta take a tenner, Alejo, it's about my brother!” He put the phone back to his ear. “Excuse me, I need to clock out for my break.”

“Take your time,” said the lawyer.

Robbie jogged into the shop, clocked out, and let himself out into the garbage alley to lean against the wall. “I'm free to talk now. Thanks for getting back to me, Mr. LaRoca.”

“No need to thank me, Mr. Reyes,” said the lawyer, reminding Robbie that someone much richer than them both was paying his bill. “Let's start with the names of all parties and organizations involved, then we'll get down to your case. Your legal name and address, your brother's legal name, the address of your brother's school, just to confirm it's the same school, understand...”

This part was a dance Robbie knew well. He spelled out both their names, gave the date he'd gotten the state to assign him guardianship over Gabe, their and the school's street addresses and phone numbers, and the name of the school district.

“Our firm should have no conflict of interest with any parties here,” Mr. LaRoca said at the end of all that. “Now go ahead and tell me about your grievance against the school, so I can get an idea if you have the legal basis for a suit.”

Robbie took a deep breath. Lawyers gave him the creeps. _I got this, I got this. Just tell him what's going on._ “Gabe's IEP has him integrated into eighth-grade classes full-time at Samuel Butler and he's been meeting his goals, but his math teacher's trying to get rid of him because she's—” **A cunt! **“—nnn, I don't know, she's always been a problem, she's never met any of my accommodation requests so I have to re-write his math worksheets at home at night so they're big enough for him to fill out and now she's completely stopped assigning him homework so I have to make my own out of the problems on the back of the book and I don't know which problems to pick 'cause he gets burnt-out from his ADHD and I want him to do the most important ones, and now she's sent a memo, she says he's not socially educable because he said _penis_ in class one time messing around with his friend, and that's bullshit, he _is,_ he's _fine,_ he's only threatened to bite a classmate once and that was when some fucker tried to steal his TA's tablet computer, and whenever _I_ bit people I never gave a warning so he's a way better person than me. It's bullshit, and Gabe doesn't deserve to lose his friends and get told he's not good enough. He is. He's good. He works so hard, Mr. LaRoca, you should see him, and Mrs. Jules, she's—she's—” Robbie's vision grayed out a second and he took a breath. “Can you forget that part where I said Gabe threatened to bite a kid.”

“That's not something I'd disclose to the other side, but it's good to know in case they bring it up,” said Mr. LaRoca evenly.

“I mean, there's not much else he can do to defend himself.” **He's got a wicked swing with those crutches.** “He's a good person, Mr. LaRoca. He loves going to school, or, or he used to.”

“Has your brother ever been given a warning or a suspension for his behavior?”

“Yeah, a warning. When he said _penis_ in class. There's this game, you say penis, the other guy says it a little louder—”

“I've got a teenage son myself, Mr. Reyes,” said Mr. LaRoca, amused. “Now about this memo. Has your brother actually been suspended or removed from class?”

“Not yet.”

“Then you may not have grounds for a claim, unfortunately.”

Robbie clenched his jaw and squeezed his phone in its case. He had to change his grip so he wouldn't accidentally crack the screen. “I'm not waiting for Gabe to get expelled.”

“No, no.” Mr. LaRoca's tone was cool, relaxed. “I just mean, from what you've told me, the school hasn't done anything for which you'd be entitled to damages.”

“I don't want damages, I want Gabe to not get kicked out.”

“I might be able to swing that.”

Robbie felt like he'd been punched in the gut. His eyes burned and he took a slow, careful breath. “Really?”

“I'll send you some forms by email,” said the lawyer. _His_ lawyer? “Once you sign them, then I'll be your and your brother's attorney for this case, and everything you tell me will be privileged. Confidential. Fax or email me your brother's IEP and all his academic and disciplinary records, and all records of communications you have with the school. Email, text, phone recordings if you have them, handwritten notes, everything. We'll look them over and see whether the school's claim about his educability is likely to be upheld. Unfortunately since they haven't taken action against him, you can't yet be entitled to any damages and you will be liable for all attorney's fees—oh, wait, this Cho gentleman is paying to represent you. Never mind. Just look the forms over and send us your records as soon as you can.”

“Yessir,” Robbie rasped. “Thank-you, sir, I will.” He hung up and stared down at his phone, his eyes refusing to focus.

**Feels like everything in your life's finally going right for once, huh.**

Robbie put his headphones back on and started Eli's podcast back up, went back through the door to punch the time-clock again. Stopped at the sink and ran some fresh water over it.

**Kinda like after you met me.**

_Amadeus is nothing like you._

**Nobody's like me. But I'd wager he's still a killer.**

Robbie returned to the polebarn, where the fumes from the fiberglass putty hit him like a brick to the sinuses. _Shut up and listen to your drug history._

**Look at that list he sent you. Tonight, while you're sending off all Gabbie's paperwork.**

**I mean. I could be wrong. Could be nothing.**

**What do I know, I'm just a goddamn adult with nothing better to do all day than think about your problems.**

* * *

That night, after emailing all Gabe's school records that he could find to Hunter LaRoca at Anderson & Zinsser, Robbie examined the blurry, barely-decipherable, hand-written photographed log-book pages that Amadeus had forwarded him from Canelo. Eli kept silent while he read. Every time Robbie looked away or thought about shutting his computer down to go to bed, Eli would start rambling on about how much he missed cocaine and the pros and cons of garrotting versus strangling Mrs. Jules—**Never let anyone fool you into thinking you need a reason to kill someone, kid! If this lawyer thing works out, we'll have all the time we could possibly want for a plan!** So Robbie combed through six pages of heavily-censored looseleaf until Eli said, **I was right.**

There was a 2018 Prius, black, recorded in Canelo's weird blocky scratches. The owner's name and phone number were blacked out. But, like Eli had said, Monterrey Park was just a hop and a skip from East Los, and they'd been getting a lot of customers from other suburbs since Canelo had stepped up their advertising.

**I guess it could be a coincidence,** said Eli with false humility.

“No,” Robbie muttered, leaning over his laptop and scrubbing his hands through his hair, “You were right. It makes sense.”

He wondered how the Elantra was doing, if its owner had taken his advice and bought a scan tool to read its strings of fault codes describing elaborate breakdown scenarios. It hadn't come in for a while. Maybe it had just wanted someone to listen.

But when the Olympus algorithm broke cars, each one came out different.

* * *

The Champions’ Quinjet stunk of sweat, mold, and septic-tank overflow. One would hope for more of an earthy aroma out in the Burma jungle—loam, insects, maybe some animal droppings—but the team had been digging for survivors in a mudslide that had taken out a small mountain town. They had found a lot of people under the mud. Not many survivors. Amadeus was hungry, filthy, and demoralized.

He lay on his side on one of the benches back in the fuselage, dehulked, not even strapped in. He realized that Nova was waving a power-bar in front of his nose, which would have been helpful, except Amadeus’s hands were too filthy to unwrap the bar and it was useless. “Shiiiit,” he moaned.

“Dude—did you hit your head? Can you even get a concussion while you’re the Hulk?” Nova demanded, touching his face.

Amadeus pulled away, buried his head under his arms. Now his face was filthy.

He heard Ms. Marvel come over, one long step from the cockpit to the passenger bay. “What’s going on?”

“He’s not responding, I’ve got the food like in his medical notes, but he’s not taking it.”

Warmth radiating toward his cold skin, hands hovering over him. “Amadeus, I'm going to touch you. Okay?”

“No,” Amadeus grunted. “Too dirty.”

“You don't want me to touch you because you're dirty?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Spider-Man, get a towel. You think you can eat something once your hands are a little cleaner?”

That sounded good. Where was that power bar? Amadeus lifted his head up, squinted at her. Red and blue and shiny gold bangles. “Starving.”

He let Spidey dry him off and scrub his hands and Nova open the wrapper to the power bar and practically shove it in his face. His salivary glands cramped as he chewed. Cane syrup, oat bran, and imitation vanilla made a flavor-explosion on his tongue. Amadeus felt his higher faculties booting back up one-by-one as he washed down the bar with a Gatorade. “Ugh. Wow. That's embarrassing.” Nova was still hovering over him, the spaceman helmet on his skinny frame making him look a bit like a bobble-head. Spidey's black suit was drying to red-brown, even the face-mask crusted with mud. “God, what a horrible day. Are you alright?”

Nova nodded. His lips were very tense and thin. Behind him, Spidey said, “Man, after a day like this, there'd be something wrong if anyone _was_ alright.”

“Sit down.” Amadeus pried himself up, crossed the Quinjet for more power bars. Spidey waved him off, so he took two for himself and handed a third to Sam. “Here. Do you want to, um, talk about it?”

Nova shook his head.

_Thank God,_ Amadeus thought. “You should probably do that when you get home,” he advised. “See a counselor. Like, at school?”

“What do I tell them?” Nova asked weakly. “Say I saw a bunch of dead people and felt like a useless failure while I was at home watching the news?”

“Yeah, sure.” Amadeus stuffed half a power-bar in his mouth.

“Nobody failed,” Ms. Marvel announced, somewhat grim. “We made a difference out there. We saved people and we got them medical care, that's not failure. And we helped people find their loved ones. We did good.”

“Yeah,” Amadeus said, clapping Nova on the shoulder and giving him a manly squeeze and shake. Across the plane, Spidey perched on his seat, arms wrapped around his knees, shedding dried mud everywhere he touched. “You did good. Everybody did good.”

It was true, he told himself. Search-and-rescue was an ideal application for all their talents: Viv to jury-rig communications and phase people out through the rubble and mud; himself, Spidey, and Ms. Marvel to lift and carry; Scott to blast away debris, Nova and Riri to do a little of everything. Like a fire department on steroids. Marvel would say that a mudslide was nobody's fault; you can't fight the weather. And that was one of Amadeus's chief frustrations, working with the Champions—he loved them, they were great kids, he was all for helping people without all the politics that hamstrung the bigger super-teams—he hated this Sisyphean parade of clean-up jobs.

Next month there would be another mudslide, somewhere else, or an earthquake, or a fire, and people would say that all these catastrophes were acts of God and the resulting human misery was inevitable. Well, Amadeus had fought gods. And this suffering was not inevitable. Preventing days like this would require serious action on housing inequality, soil erosion, stormwater management, evacuation planning, transportation infrastructure, geological risk surveillance, hell, climate change, but there were solutions to these problems. People didn't have to live in the paths of future mudslides. They didn't have to be stuck there when the rains started. They didn't have to be left with nothing after the disaster and forced to build their own shacks out of the ruins.

Tragedies like these had specific, often avoidable contributing causes. The money to fix them was out there. Amadeus knew the routing numbers.

He'd settled down a lot since he'd been a sixteen-year-old hacker on the run, but he'd never stopped hating the System.

He glanced across the Quinjet at Viv, who sat motionless on the opposite bench, green eyes unblinking. “Hey, Viv, can I use your wifi?”

“You may,” she said, staring into his soul. “Thank-you for asking.”

“You're welcome.” Amadeus unmuted his smartwatch and it immediately blew up with notifications. He glanced at Viv, concerned, but she didn't look like she'd noticed. Of course. She handled terabytes of data constantly.

He prodded the small screen without activating the holo-display—privacy, sort-of—and checked out what had happened the twenty hours he'd spent covered in mud and blood and carrying bodies.

He had thirty-two alerts from his drone-swarm in Los Angeles. They'd found the Prius.

“Yes!” he exclaimed, punching the air, drawing curious stares from Nova and Viv. He'd needed a win. He couldn't bring back the fifty-or-so people who'd died in Burma, but he could stop this stupid car from killing any more people in Los Angeles. Granted, pedestrian vehicular accidents had fallen back to the city's statistical baseline over the past month, but now he could recover the car, plug into all its computers, and eventually track down the negligent asshole responsible for the damn thing.

He raised his wrist in front of his nose and squinted at a bird's-eye view of a black Prius with a cracked front bumper, parked by a dumpster at the side of a cinder-block building. At the edge of the building, two more drones perched like spidery vultures, their rotors still. More images from different angles, swipe, swipe, swipe. The drones had found the Prius six hours ago, about ten AM Pacific Standard Time, and congregated around it, touching down on rooftops and power poles to conserve battery life. The car hadn't moved. The plates were a match. A drone bearing a radio dish had arrived a few hours late to the party, but it hadn't recorded any outgoing radio transmissions from the car in ninety-two minutes of observation, except for the tire pressure sensors, which had their own power supplies.

Maybe its batteries were dead.

“What's going on?” Sam.

Amadeus didn't think he could get away with announcing, _I finally tracked down this killer car,_ without also revealing that he'd covered Los Angeles in ten thousand dollars' worth of illegal surveillance drones and spy cameras, declined to tell anyone else on the team that there was a killer car, and hired legal help for someone the LAPD considered a supervillain. “Personal project,” he said.

He texted Robbie.

-Found the car

\- 34.015445, -118.202731

-Stationary 6 hours

-Address is 15 and spence

-Landing in LA in about 3 hours

He yelled over to the cockpit. “Hey, Scott, can you swing by LA and drop me off on top of the DoubleTree Hilton?”

“What? No,” Scott yelled back, the spoilsport. “Who knows if the roof can take it?”

“It’ll be fine!”

“I’ll call LAX, see if they can work me in. Or maybe a smaller airport.”

“No, you’ll be circling forever for a spot at the runway.” Amadeus pulled up a map on his watch’s holodisplay. “I’m pushing a destination to the nav computer. Just hover over this park and I’ll hop out.”

“Stop messing with the nav system while we're flying. Please.”

“Got it? It’s a little city park, I can drop in and call a rideshare.”

“Fine,” said Scott, exasperated. “Sure. Our next team meeting is still in Jersey City. Be there.”

“I’m a big boy, I can fly all by myself.”

Riri turned around in her seat and whistled at him. “You want a ride to the ground, or are you just gonna jump?”

“Jump,” said Amadeus smugly.

“Never say I don’t offer to do anything for you,” she drawled. “Boys.”

Amadeus was a man, thank-you-very-much. He sniffed, closed the holodisplay, and balled up his wrappers and tossed his Gatorade bottles in the Quinjet’s recycle bin. He went back to scrolling through the data the drones had captured from the Prius, holding his arm up so the screen was six inches from his eyes. The car had just been sitting there in the alley since the first drone had found it. Nobody had gotten out, gotten in, or otherwise messed with it; he saw a man in coveralls walking past the Prius to dump two large trash bags in the dumpster, but the Prius (thank God/s) hadn't moved. Amadeus checked how long it had been sitting there. His drones had last passed over these coordinates last week; he examined the still that was stored on the server in case the AI had missed something: the image was grainy, shadowed, and much higher up than today’s feed, but he could tell there were no black cars there. The Prius had still been operable as recently as six days ago. Probably still was. Amadeus wondered what kind of a schedule it followed. Most of the pedestrian impacts had been at night. Maybe it was programmed to wait until after dark before moving, to make it harder to track and identify.

His watch vibrated. He poked the notification: incoming call from Robbie. Amadeus considered locking himself into the bathroom, but that would just draw more attention to himself. “Hey, man. Great news, right?”

“Yeah. Great,” Robbie said flatly. Which was probably as close as Robbie got to celebratory. In the background, Amadeus heard the _reeEEE-ug-ug-ug-ug-ug_ of a power-drill-thingie, an impact wrench. “Look, I gotta talk to you.”

“Yeah. Can't wait to get out of this tin can. Ye olde terra firma.” Amadeus winced to himself, an image of mud and shattered trees and homes and people and animals mixed together, the smell still on his hands and in his hair—terra not so firma. “Shower, shower would be great. I'm just off a disaster-recovery job in Burma, I'll tell you about it when I get there. Hey, how's that thing going with your brother's school? My guy get it straightened out ok?”

Silence down the line for a moment. “He says you'll have to pay his entire bill because he doesn't think the school will go through with it once he talks to them.”

“Hey, that's great! False alarm, huh?”

Another pause. Rumbling and clanging in the background. “Yeah. With a lawyer telling them where to shove their bullshit, it's a false alarm. But the people responsible for letting it get this far aren't getting punished. Mrs. Jules is still gonna teach Gabe. They could pull this shit next year on some other poor kid.” Pause. “You found the car. Where are you?”

“Pacific Ocean.”

“Fuck. Canelo's gonna put me on night shift if I keep cutting out.”

“It hasn't moved. All the, uh,” Amadeus was about to say _attacks,_ but not with Nova eavesdropping shamelessly. “_incidents_ happened at night. It probably rests during the day. I'm actually on a plane right now. I'll be on the ground in a couple hours and then I'll rent a tow dolly and we can go pick it up.”

“You think it'll just stay there?”

“I've got eyes on it.”

“Can you do anything to make sure?”

“Yeah, I found an exploit. I'd rather just leave it as long as it's not doing anything—leave the code as-is—”

“Can you just do it now.” Robbie always sounded annoyed, but this was more than usual.

“Trust me, I got this under control.”

“Do it.”

That hurt. Amadeus frowned at his watch. “Fine. I'll transmit the code through the drone, spoof the manufacturer's master keyfob signal. It's gonna apply the brakes, freeze power from the propulsion battery, and trip the fuel pump shutoff switch. Car's not going anywhere. Okay?”

“You can't just fry the whole system?”

“Not if we ever want to know who built this thing,” Amadeus said. “And also, no. Overkill, much?”

“Mmnn,” Robbie grunted. “I still gotta talk to you.”

That wasn't ominous. “What, like talk-talk? I, uh, didn't know we'd gotten that far in our relationship,” Amadeus joked, but Robbie was silent.

Abruptly he asked, “Can machines have souls?”

Amadeus looked across the cargo bay at Viv. She stared back at him, expression neutral. She probably had no idea that a neutral expression in response such a potentially inflammatory question was a hundred times more worrisome than an offended expression. That was like, Human Studies Level IV. “Uuuh,” Amadeus said. “That's, uh, that's like asking can humans have souls. I mean, we're just water and protein and chemical reactions. And I know for a fact humans do have something like a soul, long story, so I guess my answer is,” he licked his lips, watching Viv watching him, “why not?” _Okay?_ He mouthed to her.

She shrugged.

Robbie groaned, and Amadeus heard a harsh huff of breath against the microphone. “Ugh. Fine. Specifically, would a demon want a machine’s soul?”

Amadeus laughed, uncertain. “What, you want to know if your evil car is going to hell?”

“Oh, I _know_ my car is going to hell,” said Robbie with unexpected venom. “But I think, in general?”

Viv was still watching him, one eyebrow raised.

“Why not?” Amadeus repeated.

“Right, thanks,” Robbie said abruptly. “Text me when you get back.”

He hung up.

Amadeus ignored the curious stares of Viv, Nova, and Ms. Marvel, and uploaded his exploit to the drone with the parabolic dish that could send and record radio signals, and from there to the Prius. He watched the video feeds: the car's running lights flashed, a signal that the car had accepted the exploit.

Car definitely still had power.

Satisfied that the Prius could wait, Amadeus Googled a U-Haul outlet in LA and rented a tow dolly he could hitch to the back of his food truck.

He tried to nap the rest of the way across the ocean. Until he had a shower, a good laugh, and maybe a visit to the animal shelter to cuddle some puppies, that wasn't happening. Instead he scrolled through @dog_rates, curled up over his watch with a towel draped over his shoulders. The hours stuttered by in a haze of dog photos, all ages, all breeds, all camera angles. No coyotes. A New Guinea Singing Dog puppy that reminded him a bit of Kirby. He missed Kirby. Hoped he was taking care of himself, out in the wild.

The Quinjet shuddered and wobbled violently, as was usual when it engaged the air-brakes and switched from cruising turbojets to VTOL repulsors. There were no windows in the passenger bay, so Amadeus got up and hovered behind Scott and Riri in the cockpit. Los Angeles splayed out around them, an endless basin lined in green and gray and brown, flashing with windows and traffic lights. Their nose was pointed toward a small green square, looked like a postage stamp from above. Amadeus had a brainwave and requested a Lyft to his hotel.

“OK, big green, here’s your stop,” said Riri. “Everybody not planning to jump out of this plane, strap in.”

They slowed, descended, hovered about five hundred feet over the park. Riri dropped the loading ramp, and Amadeus hulked up, strode out to the edge, peered down at the trees and watered green below for a spot with no people picnicking, and hopped out.

Wind whistled past his ears. The air had a faint seaside smell, fast eclipsed by diesel exhaust, weed-killer, hot asphalt, creosote from treated power poles. Trees and cars expanded in his vision as the world rose. He landed on the balls of his feet, bent his knees, caught himself on one hand, leaving three broad dents in the sandy lawn.

“Holy fuck!” a woman yelled from behind him. Her dog barked at him and her elementary-school kids stared, the whites of their eyes showing.

“Eat your spinach,” Amadeus yelled, and Flossed a couple seconds until the kids stopped looking so shell-shocked. He dehulked, ambled to the street corner, and waited for his Lyft.

The sun was just starting to go down. At his hotel, he hurried through a shower—Robbie would be free from work soon, but first Amadeus had to get Burma out of his hair, off his skin. He put on his spare Hulk shorts, splashed on some aftershave so he couldn’t smell what the shower had missed. Down to the parking garage, out into the hazy slanting big-city sunlight. Take the food truck to the U-Haul place, sign some forms, heave the tow-dolly onto the truck’s rear hitch. Finally, creeping down the clogged freeway toward East LA and Canelo’s Auto and Body.

He kicked himself all the way there; it would be simple to put some tie-downs on the roof of the food truck so he could lash the tow-dolly up top and fly over. Well. Maybe next time he had to go collect a killer car for science.

The exit let him out onto Olympic Avenue, with its strip malls and car dealerships, overstock outlets and payday lenders, butcher's shops and panaderías. A short stretch of gridlock before the light to turn onto Hillrock Lane, then the road went from four lanes to two, the storefronts were narrower, graffiti and colorful murals interlaced and layered over-each-other on the walls of businesses and apartment blocks. At last, Amadeus pulled into the lot at Canelo's Auto and Body, the tow dolly jouncing in the truck's side mirrors. He parked and walked into the lobby.

Canelo's lobby was about the size of the food truck's kitchen. It held some mismatched wooden kitchen chairs that looked like they'd come from yard sales, a nightstand stacked with tattered _People_ and automotive magazines, a coffee maker, and a popcorn machine whose glass sides were amber-crusted with layers of hardened butter. An empty window separated it from the crowded workbay, where an air-compressor growled a noisy duet with a revving engine. There was nobody at the reception desk. A little chrome bell sat on the counter; Amadeus smacked it with his palm. Hoped somebody could hear it. He saw a guy in coveralls using a machine in one corner to pry the tire off a wheel. He waved, but no one looked over at him. He looked for Robbie, didn't see him.

Come to think of it, he hadn't seen Robbie's car outside, either. Maybe it was parked around the back.

His watch buzzed. Robbie. “Hey, I'm at the shop, where—”

“Car's gone,” Robbie's voice snarled. He heard an engine rumbling and whining in the background, over the line. A cold shock ran through his guts.

“What do you mean, the car's gone?” Amadeus demanded. “Where are you?”

“Fifteenth and Spence. At the coordinates. We circled the block twice, it's gone. You said it wouldn't move. Are you playing with me?”

Amadeus's turn to snarl down the phone. “Of course not. No. Are you sure you're at the right coordinates?”

Rumbling. “I'm a fucking Uber driver, I can navigate. The car's not. Fucking. Here.”

“It's in an alley between the warehouses—”

“I checked!”

“Hang on.” Amadeus scrolled through his drone feeds, and the ground seemed to drop out from under him. The drones had dispersed, none of them were hovering over the alley. They would only do that if they'd lost sight of their target, and they should have followed it; the server that directed their tracking behavior should have sent them after it; he should have gotten an alert the moment they'd seen the Prius move, same as if any of the drones had been shot down.

He checked his alert history. He'd been in the shower. “Oh fuck. Fuck.”

“What happened,” Robbie demanded.

“I'm figuring that out.” Amadeus left Canelo's and hopped back into the truck, flicked drone feeds off his watch and onto the dashboard heads-up display. He scrolled backwards through the images. Road, static, road, road, road, alley, static. Static, static, Prius. Something had disrupted the transmission from the drones to the central server. All the drones at once when they'd been watching the Prius, and one particular drone as it passed over 8th Street. “Someone sent a jamming signal that stopped the drones from reporting to the central server. The server houses the AI that can recognize their target. Without instructions from the server, they reverted to their default surveillance behavior, which is to fly around and take pictures of every dark-colored car they see.”

“How long ago?”

“About half an hour.”

Rumbling and shrieking down the line, and a weird slapping sound like Robbie had tossed his phone.

“I've recorded the tire-pressure-monitor pings,” Amadeus said, mostly to himself. “I've still got the scanners at the freeway onramps. But they never caught the car actually using an onramp, so maybe it's programmed to avoid the freeway—they've got those traffic cameras everywhere, that'd be an easy place to get caught—” He wrote a script for his surveillance camera-phone-dishes on the freeway onramps to automatically alert him if they detected any of the Prius's tire pressure monitor signals, not just if they recognized a driverless car. An alert popped up immediately, time-stamped twelve minutes old. “I stand corrected. Robbie! Robbie, pick up, it's north-bound on I-5, it's on the freeway. Let me get in the air and we'll find it.” He switched back to the server that controlled his drones, sent the swarm to cover the I-5 onramps and also directed the server to alert him with their last known location if any of them lost signal again. If the car's operator tried to jam his drones again, he'd know where to start looking.

He engaged the VTOL system, the truck shuddering as its stage-one repulsors lifted its tires off the ground. The back end bucked and he heard a clang below him. The tow dolly lay in the parking lot. “Stupid. Gonna have to pay for that.” He dialed up the thrust and swooped toward I-5. “Robbie! Robbie, you there? I'm in the air, I'm gonna try to get eyes on the car. You can teleport to a target, right?”

“We need a picture,” Robbie said, rough. Amadeus had been worried he'd just stormed off and left his phone. “If I don't know the place, I need a picture.”

“Can do.”

“Which onramp did it use, how long ago?”

“Breed Street, fifteen minutes. Traffic's good for LA, it's moving twenty to fifty miles an hour.”

“Shit. I'll wait here. Send me a pic of where to put the portal, facing the right way to traffic. You in a helicopter?”

“Close enough. I got you. Over and out.”

* * *

Robbie and the car shuddered with frustration, in the alley between the warehouses at Fifteenth and Spence. The phone lay on the passenger seat so he wouldn't accidentally burn it with his hands. His gloves clenched so hard around his steering wheel that the leather creaked. His idle was rough, juddering his seat, and his blower hissed continually.

**I got an idea for how to kill Cho.**

He had to trust that Amadeus wanted to catch the car. Every indication was that the broken cars' behavior was an accident. Of course he could be playing some game where he wanted to see how many people he could kill before anyone caught him; that was always in the back of Robbie's mind, but he didn't have any proof. Robbie didn't kill people without proof—not yet. Even though Amadeus had to have guessed how the Prius had come to be, refusing to admit responsibility wasn't the same as creating it on purpose. He'd been working to catch it. _We're not killing Cho._

**Load a shotgun shell with sodium hydroxide, ya know, drain cleaner. Lye. Load it in a sawed-off. Shoot him in the head point-blank, or if he's already green, shoot right through one of the weak spots, in the ear or up the nose. Turn his brain into soap.**

_We're not killing Cho unless he made the car kill people on purpose. That's the deal._

**How convenient for you that the deal only applies when you want to get out of killing somebody.**

_Anyway where would we even get that shit._

**Rob a gun store.**

Robbie rolled his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, keeping it slow and deep, trying to stop the engine fumes from scorching his throat before Amadeus's call. They'd already found the car, he reminded himself. They knew its plates, what it looked like, something about the TPM sensors. If it got away now, they could find it again—it might kill more, but they would find it again soon, and next time it wouldn't get away.

It might kill more.

He clenched his teeth and panted, pressing his feet into the floor and his head back into his headrest. If they didn't catch it this time, it might kill more innocent people.

Robbie had stayed to finish his shift at Canelo's only because Amadeus had promised the car wouldn't move.

**Gun store...**

He breathed in through the nose, out through the mouth, and the valves of his blower fluttered open and closed as his awareness threaded deeper and deeper through the car. His phone beeped. A photo: the eight-lane highway, an exit sign visible, 1558 Van Nuys Boulevard. He picked up the phone with the tips of his fingers and peered at the photo, his heart racing. _Put us on the shoulder. You ready?_

**Not so fast, lemme look. Puta-madre, you always rush me.**

He forced himself still while Eli studied the image through his eyes. He held his breath, and the core of his chest burned hotter, hotter.

**Got it.**

Robbie coughed fire and stuffed the phone in his glove compartment, stomped the gas. The engine smoothed out to a roar, the blower screamed, smoke and ash boiled up from his lungs, the golden heat of combustion raced through his veins and scoured his bones; his shame and doubt and frustration were gone, torn from him by the pain, and then there was only rage—pure and powerful. Why had he ever thought he should stop? This was his purpose, to beat the shit out of killers and predators, to be the monster his city's monsters dread, to take revenge on behalf of those too kind or too dead to take it for themselves. Robbie Reyes may be half-decayed into Eli Morrow's reincarnation, but the Rider had always been something in-between.

He felt Eli concentrating, and held the image Amadeus had sent in the front of their mind. A fireball hovered in the air in front of their front bumper, expanding to a bright ring and a black void. The Rider hit the gas, burned rubber, and blasted through.

The dark opened yards above the rushing traffic of the Golden State Freeway, shooting him out at an angle. He crashed to the shoulder and bounced off the concrete median, straightened the warped frame and front axle and took off, shrieking past traffic. A stalled car blocked his path and the Rider grit his teeth, gripped his wheel, made the car soft as mist and passed right through, foreign glass and metal intruding on his sight and body for an instant. He snarled, venting flames. Somewhere, in these four lanes of moving vehicles, was his target, the killer. He had no way to communicate with Cho. The Rider sank into his seat and hauled himself up out of the roof, scanning the cars, the flames of his blower licking his shins, wind whistling through his teeth and eyesockets. It was evening, daylight; the shadows cast by the cars were sharp but not deep and they shifted constantly, none stable enough to travel through. Container trucks blocked huge chunks of road from his view; the Prius could be hiding behind any of them. He reached down into the metal of his roof, pulled out a spiked body-hammer, dug his boots in and jumped.

He caught himself on the roof of a minivan. It slowed immediately, and he snarled, frustrated. He hopped sideways, down, onto a sedan. Traffic was loose and flowing well, most cars keeping a good thirty feet of following distance, and that was inconvenient for him when he wanted to get up high. He pushed forward off the sedan, landed hard in a pick-up bed, busted the window with his elbow. This truck slowed down too. He screamed into the window at the driver and the truck accelerated, put him up beside a container truck, finally. He leapt, lashed out with his hammer-spike, punched through the steel and hung from the side of the trailer. Swung himself up onto the top and surfed, watching the freeway up and down for a little black car. The Charger screamed along the shoulder ahead of him, half his body and mind, ready for him to slip back into. As soon as he found the Prius...

A whining sound from above, and a downward blast of wind. He looked up. A dark rectangular object with bright glowing disks at each of its four corners, a truck or van levitating on Stark Tech. Amadeus Cho leaning out the window, pointing backward, upstream of traffic. The Rider followed his arm and scanned the cars behind him, letting the Charger slow until the traffic overtook it.

Cho's truck rose out of view suddenly and the Rider flattened himself to the top of the trailer just as a bridge swept over his head. He fell through the dark of his own shadow and back into the Charger, hauled himself up out of his roof again.

New clusters of cars, more semi-trailers blocking his view. He looked up at Cho's hovercar—still leaning out the window, pointing back, backward. Cho must have sent them their destination immediately after the Prius passed the previous freeway exit, giving them as much time as possible to open the portal, more than they needed. He slowed, let the other cars roll by, watched them shift past each-other. A little black car—Gen-2 Prius. A dark green Aztec with body damage, that resembled his target from a distance until he spotted it clearly in a gap through the traffic. He was travelling at thirty-seven, the other cars around forty, forty-five. He let himself slip back, back, back, his whole being alert and watching, sparks crackling through his teeth, fists clenched.

He couldn’t believe he was this wound-up over a _car._

There, there, three lanes away, second from the right. Black fourth-generation Prius tailgating a silver Nissan Pathfinder, cracked front fascia. No driver.

He screamed, his jaws full of fire. He opened his throttle and the Charger lunged forward, burning tires chewing ruts into the concrete. He pulled level with the black Prius and scanned the lanes between them for gaps to merge through; like hell was he going to phase through three or four cars in a row from multiple directions, that was asking for a pile-up. He gestured sharply for a little wedge-shaped Honda Fit to slow down and let him in. The driver raised her middle finger at him and sped up.

He bent to a crouch and snarled. Cheeky bitch. Maybe before he put his fist through the killer car's engine block, he could teach her a little common sense—her jaw shattering in his hand—her beady eyes red and bulging from strangulation—

Something heavy crashed down onto his trunk. His rear shocks bottomed out painfully, his steel dented, and he lashed out with his hammer. Cho caught it, huge and green and muscle-bound and very nearly invulnerable. The Rider screamed at him, flames and hot sparks of steel erupting from his chest and out his mouth and eyes. The Hulk weathered the blast like a rock in a rainstorm.

“Here's the plan,” Cho said.

“_**Get off,**_” the Rider snarled.

“Oh, good, you talk. So. You ghost-ride your way over in front of the Prius, I kinda hang off your back bumper—maybe you can roll the windows down so I can hook my feet through them. I pick up the Prius's front end. _Voilá._ It's a front wheel drive, we've got complete control except for maybe the brakes and I think your car can handle dragging it. Tow it to the next exit and then we pick a private spot and disable the car.”

**He wants it back.**

“_I send it to Hell,_” the Rider countered. “_It kills people._”

Cho frowned. “No, no, you're not seeing the big picture.”

The Rider drew himself up and shrieked, appalled.

“I don't mean it in a bad way!” Cho defended himself. “I have to study the car! See who made it, stop them from making more. Otherwise we'll be doing this same dance next month!”

_It's like he doesn't know._

**He's ** _ **pretending** _ ** he doesn't know!**

“_**Fine,**_” growled the Rider. He bulled his way into the left lane—_**beep-beep motherfucker**__—_and wedged the Charger between an Expedition and a dented Probe. Horns shrilled from behind him. The Rider snarled at them, flames billowing from his throat and vents and blower and wheels, and below him on his trunk the Hulk made apologetic gestures. The Charger braked, signaled with a gout of fire and sparks, slipped into another gap. Cars behind them were slowing, trying to avoid the burning tracks the Charger left on the roadway, and the traffic behind them was starting to bunch and ripple. Now they were two car-lengths behind the Prius, one lane to the side. They could catch up by passing through the Cayenne in front of them. “_Get small,_” the Rider growled at Cho.

The Hulk raised his eyebrows. “What, now?”

The Rider jabbed his finger down at the Charger's cabin.

“On top of a moving car that's on fire, while you're, uh, in my personal space? I'm flattered you think so highly of my self-control but that's not happening.”

The Rider contemplated stuffing the Hulk inside his cabin, folding down both the front seats and phasing Cho through the roof in fetal position. That, also, was not happening: still too big. Idiot should have stayed up in his flying truck, let the Rider take care of this his way. Always meddling. Always thinking five steps ahead of him but in the wrong direction.

The Rider darted to the edge of his hood and roared at the Cayenne, reached through his steel for a chain and whirled it threateningly. The Cayenne sped up, rode the bumper of the rusty Geo in front of it.

Over the roar of his engine and the rushing cars, he heard a new sound, overhead, coming closer, a furious whup-whup-whup. He looked up over his shoulder, and it was almost on top of him, pointing cameras or rifles right at him, hovering. _Fucking helicopters. _He got up a good spin with the chain, a shining disk of steel and kinetic energy, formed a body-hammer on the end with a nasty sharp point. Spooled up more chain with his free hand, slack for a hundred, three hundred feet, the fires in his eyesockets fixed up on his target. Rotors were fragile. Tangle one, snap one, and the whole helicopter would drop from the sky like a brick, all that aircraft fuel would light up with a _whuuf_ and send a plume of fire and smoke hundreds of feet in the air—

The Hulk darted forward, faster than he should be able to move, and caught the spinning chain. “Dude.” The Rider punched him with the coiled end. He rolled with the blow. “What the fuck are you doing? That's a news chopper!”

_Reporters_, the Rider reminded himself. That news helicopter was full of innocent people who weren't about to shoot him or anyone else and they didn't deserve to get chains and hammers flung at them just because the fireball would be pretty and the chopper's noise reminded the Rider of the night Robbie had died.

He was here for the Prius. He could just see it, ahead and to the side over the peeling roof of a white Blazer: they just had to catch it and get it off the road and roll it and there would be blood and hair caked under its undercarriage from all the people it had struck and injured, struck and killed. Once he caught it, he could get away from the helicopter. The hum of his engine shook his chest and filled him with fire, blazing out through his vents.

He tugged at his hammer, still in the Hulk’s fist. The Hulk gripped it tight. “Robbie, talk to me.”

“_**Hiyrrrrrrh,**_” he growled, sparks spurting out from between his jaws. He imagined lunging at Cho’s wrist and sinking his teeth into it. Imagination and action were very close for the Rider, but he managed to stop himself. He was meant to be Robbie. Hunting down the Prius had been Robbie’s idea. Robbie rose up within the Rider’s mind. “_I won’t hurt the news people._”

Cho let him have the hammer back. He had a lot of nerve. “This is getting way out of control. There’s too many bystanders. We should wait for it to exit the freeway.”

Wait? They were so close. He whirled the chain and the spike-hammer again, and slung it out hard, forward, embedding the spike in the Prius's roof. The driver of the peeling Blazer behind it didn't appreciate a hundred-foot length of red-hot tow chain slamming against its windshield, and braked. The Sentra behind the Blazer almost slammed into its bumper. A slow-down began to ripple backward through the lane, but suddenly the Charger overtook the Sentra, then the Blazer, and now there was a gap behind the Prius that they swung into, the Rider reeling back on the chain, goosing the throttle.

“What the hell are you doing?” Cho bellowed. “You just caused a pile-up, what’s your mental malfunction?”

The fucking helicopter was causing his mental malfunction, but the Rider wasn't about to admit that. _Get us out of here. Don't cut anybody in half._

**You gotta be shitting me. **

_Please._

**You think this is easy? This is practically bumper-to-bumper! “Don’t cut anybody in half.” Tell you what, snug us up to its ass, get us at least a semi-truck’s worth of breathing room in front and behind, and we ** _ **probably** _ ** won’t cut anyone in half. Or worse, get followed.**

In front of them, the Prius lunged forward against the chain, unexpected but not nearly strong enough to break the Rider's grip. Plenty strong to tear the thin sheet metal where the hammer dug in, though.

The Rider braced his feet and kept hauling the chain in, hand-over-hand, feeling it melt and rejoin the rest of his steel the moment it dropped onto his hood. Fifty feet. Forty. Almost close enough—

The Hulk climbed up over his roof, yanked the chain from him, grabbed the Rider around the torso with one massive hand, and threw him through the air at the Prius. The Rider bellyflopped onto its the roof with a clang, caught himself by the hammer. He shrieked back over his shoulder, sparks bouncing over the black paint.

“I said you _had_ time,” Cho yelled at him across the gap. “You don't now. Pull that thing off the road!”

The Rider snarled. The Charger fountained flames from its blower, flowing around the Hulk's knees. He reached over the side of the Prius and punched through the passenger window, then swung his feet around and squeezed inside.

The interior was damp and steamed against his skin. Leaf litter covered the footwells. There was a cigarette abandoned on one seat, next to a small burn mark. Even though the roof should be a barrier to the helicopter noise, he was still on-edge, overheated. His flames scorched the headrest and the roof upholstery. It felt strange, numb, to sit in a car he wasn’t a part of. He cast his mind back to the Charger, watched himself with its lights: bright flames lighting the interior of a little black lift-back with z-shaped tail lights.

All the Prius’s dashboard display screens were black. He pushed the brake, and it sank down almost to the floorboards before it met any resistance. The Prius's electric motor whined and its engine revved, but the Rider pushed the brake harder and the hybrid slowed, shuddering. The Charger slammed into its bumper and the Hulk fell forward off the Charger’s hood, caught himself on the back of the Prius. The Rider kept the Charger pressed close to the Prius's bumper, under Cho's feet, and let up on the Prius's brake. Now he was pushing the other car, braking and accelerating in tandem with it, trying to force a gap in traffic in front and behind himself.

The Prius swerved left toward a gap behind the Porsche Cayenne. The Rider gripped the wheel, hauling right, but nothing happened. He tugged harder and the wheel snapped off, trailing wires. He shrieked, barely restrained himself from punching the dashboard as he turned the Charger to follow it.

A sound rocked through him, a heavy crack like a gunshot, but deeper, stronger, rattling the Prius's windows. He checked the mirror. The Hulk surfing the Charger's hood, swinging his palms together: another thunderclap that rattled his skin around his bones. He stuck his head out the broken window. The damn helicopter whup-whupped overhead.

“Hook the chain under the front bumper so I can pick the front wheels off the road,” the Hulk ordered, and the Rider ground his teeth and crawled back up onto the roof of the Prius. The damn laptop-on-wheels swerved again, just as he was most of the way out the window, and his boots slipped and he barely caught himself by one hand, the steel knee-guards of his skin-suit sparking against the concrete rushing by below. His right foot almost went under one of the back wheels. He jerked himself up by the edge of the window, got his feet up again, reached up over the roof, and grabbed his body hammer. Heaved himself up by the handle, and tugged at the chain for some slack. The Hulk fed out about ten feet. The Prius ate it up, speeding until it rode ten feet from the bumper of the Cayenne—and then it slowed.

If the Rider had lips, he would have grinned. The little car had an automatic collision avoidance system. It was afraid of body damage.

The Hulk fed him some more slack. The Rider reshaped the body hammer into a hook, yanked it out of the roof's sheet metal, and crawled head-down over the front of the Prius, hooking his toes into the gutter-space between the base of the windshield and the back of the hood, the vents of his skull almost scraping the concrete as he peered under the bumper. There was a scrap of cloth caught in a seam between the wheel well and the fender. A crackly brown blood-stain against the torn rubber air dam. People. People who hadn't deserved to be hurt, who'd just_ been there;_ this was why the Rider was here, this was why they'd caught the car, and when he stopped himself from reaching deep underneath and ripping the transaxle out with his hands, immobilizing the car and tearing it into shrapnel, it was only through the full force of his meager self-restraint.

He found the front tow-hitch and hooked up the chain. “_Pull,_” he yelled at Cho.

“Got it, pardner,” yelled the Hulk in a Texan accent. Then he hauled back on the chain, crushing the Prius against the Charger's front bumper, his weight digging down on the front shocks as the Prius's front end rose into the air. As the windshield tilted level with the ground, the Rider pushed himself up and stood on the glass. Down below the hood, the engine and motor revved and whined, the electric power-steering clicked and jolted, but the Prius was a front-wheel drive, and they had it caught. The rear tires began to smoke as the Prius applied its brakes.

The Rider saw the traffic opening up behind them as cars switched lanes out of fear of rolling debris, opening up in front of them as they slowed below the flow of traffic. _Looks good. Get us out._

A fireball flashed in the air before them, just behind the Cayenne, swiftly spiraling into broad black void just as the Prius and Charger reached it. They passed through and it flickered shut behind them.

* * *

Two cars crashed down in a garbage alley behind a hair salon. Up on a power pole, a transformer sparked continually. Far from the chase on the freeway, the sky was empty.

The Charger braked hard, skidding on burning tires under rutted concrete. The Prius spun around by the chain on its front tow hitch, sending the Rider flying off against a cinderblock wall, came to rest facing out of the alley, beside the Charger. It accelerated, hit the limit of the chain, spun its front wheels.

The Hulk hopped off the Charger, reeled the Prius in, and picked it up under the front bumper. Its drive wheels spun helplessly, three feet off the ground. “Finally. Turn this thing off so I can take a look.”

Even away from the helicopter, the Rider was still on edge, too hot. It was the Prius. He still wanted to shred it with his hands, beat it and melt it into slag with the Charger. But not yet. By an effort of will, the Rider snuffed out. Flesh sizzled against his aching bones, organs churned uncomfortably in the hollows under his skin. Robbie pushed himself up onto his knees, stood with one hand braced on the wall. One of the cinderblocks was cracked where the Rider's steel skull had struck it. He felt cold, now. The helicopter noise still rang in his ears, and his body ached: his jaw, his hip. He'd been shot there, he remembered. He'd been shot all over, for no reason: he hadn't hurt anyone, he'd surrendered to the fake cops after they'd chased him in their chopper and cornered him in an alley, on his knees pleading for mercy with his hands on his head, but they'd leveled their rifles at him and opened fire, murdered him because he was inconvenient, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Odd how he couldn't usually remember dying. He must be thinking of it because of the news helicopter, or the crust of blood on the Prius's air dam.

He checked himself over: jacket, pants, fingerless gloves. Pockets, wallet: good. He wasn't still sealed into the Rider's skin. He stumbled to the Charger, opened the trunk as he got close, retrieved a pair of needlenose pliers he'd grabbed from his toolbox after Cho had texted him today. Trudged toward the Prius's driver's side door, stuck his arm through the shattered window as the Hulk lowered the front end for him. Opened the door, popped the hood, leaned in awkwardly over Cho's tree-trunk arms. Found the fuse-box near the left roof pillar, popped the lid off, then yanked out fuses until the motor died with a soft whine.

Robbie stuck the fuses and the pliers in his pockets and watched as Cho set the Prius down and dwindled back to his hundred-thirty-pound human form.

“Thanks,” Cho said, tightening the drawstring of his spandex shorts. “That was a shitshow back there, but all's well that ends well. I can't wait to get cracking on this, I've been wanting to study this thing for months.”

Robbie sucked a fold of flesh from the inside of his lip between his teeth. He worried it a little, stared down at the dents and scrapes on the Prius's front bumper, and bit down until blood welled into his mouth.

“I mean, who does this?” Cho continued, leaning under the hood, his hands ghosting an inch over the hot smooth curves of the tiny exhaust manifold. “Who builds a fully self-directing AI, loads it into a family car, and then _loses_ it? Forget _how_, I want to _meet_ this idiot.”

Robbie knelt down beside the fender, twisted down on one elbow, and peered underneath with his penlight. The undercarriage was clean of mud, no back-country driving for this vehicle. But here and there were dark streaks on the sooty steel, and it smelled like dried meat. He shuddered, fought down the phantom noise of helicopters and the chill in his blood and the fire rising in his chest in response. He spat blood into his palm and smeared it on the frame, a little piece of himself to join the pieces of dead people the car carried with it.

“I mean, come on! LoJack's been around for decades! And just a, friggin, pair of railroad ties and it's not going anywhere! Did they somehow _not know_ it could start itself?”

“Stop.” Robbie stood and wiped his glove on his pants. “Just. Amadeus.” The ridiculous name felt strange in Robbie's mouth. Cho peeped around the hood at him. “I know you're not responsible for killing those people,” Robbie gritted out. “So stop treating me like an idiot. I helped you fix your mistake. You got a month to figure out what went wrong, how to recognize it, how to delete it, then I'm coming for the car to send it to Hell. We're done.”

Amadeus's mouth dropped open. He looked hurt, baffled. “Run that by me again?”

Robbie threw his hands in the air. “I don't blame you for the murders!” he bellowed.

“Whoa. Huh.” Amadeus stepped away from the Prius, edged toward Robbie, palms out. “Thank-you? I, uh, I don't blame you for the murders either?”

“Don't feed me that bullshit,” Robbie snapped. “I know. _I know!_ I figured it out! Just 'cause I'm not a quantum hypergenius like you, doesn't mean I can't connect a couple dots! I'm not holding you responsible, but you _lying_ to me is making that really difficult!”

“Robbie. Calm down.”

“I'm very calm!” Robbie snarled, all his skin in goosebumps from the smell of meat that wafted from the undercarriage of the Prius and the close call with the news helicopter, his heart pounding and his gloves creaking around his clenched fists. He knew he was calm because his engine was still off, and when he took a deep breath, he could still smell the blood on the Prius through his own exhaust fumes. He coughed and shook his head, left the Prius and paced around and around the Charger. Eli was quiet. He did that sometimes: listened in silence as he waited to see what Robbie would do.

“Can you please, for the sake of argument, pretend I don't know what you think I know so you can explain it to me?” Cho asked, his arms wrapped around his bare chest. The sun had gone down, and a cool wind was picking up, dispersing the warmth of the day that still radiated off the asphalt and concrete of the alley.

Robbie stopped and braced his palms against his hood, head low. The valves of the blower creaked as they opened and shut in time with his breathing. “Really,” Robbie said at last, pushing himself away. “Really.” He stomped to the Prius, beckoning over his shoulder, and guided Cho's head in through the broken driver's side window, aimed his penlight at the upper left corner of the windshield. A little vinyl sticker read, _Canelo's Auto And Body_, and a next-service date a couple weeks out.

Amadeus tensed beside him. “How long ago did your shop get this car in?”

“By that sticker, almost two months ago,” Robbie said.

Amadeus shoved away from the Prius, his bare shoulders tense, his bare feet padding up and down the rutted pavement. Robbie watched, stiff. At last, Amadeus said, “The scanner algorithm.” His shock seemed sincere.

“You really didn't know about this.”

Amadeus whirled on him. “And you did? Why didn't you tell me?”

“I thought you knew!”

“What, you thought I'd just leave a dangerous tool—” Amadeus clutched the back of his head and bent over. “Oh my God, I killed those people.”

“No,” Robbie bit out, shoving away from the Prius again. “The car did.”

“I modified its programming, I should have seen—”

“The car chose to kill people.” Guilt, very faint, began to twist in Robbie's chest. “You're not responsible for the choices your AI makes. Tony Stark said so in _Scientific American._”

“Tony Stark is an idiot,” Amadeus snapped. “Oh, God. This is Asimov. This is basic shit, Robbie, these cars, they don't have the Three Laws, their ECU's programming is to optimize the performance/efficiency/longevity of the _car, _it doesn't give a shit about humans so of course it did this for self-preservation, I should have seen this, _I should have seen this—_”

“It's not self-preservation!” Robbie yelled. “It killed people because it's fun!”

Amadeus gaped at him.

“It's fun,” Robbie repeated. “That's why people kill people over and over like that. Because it's fun. Your algorithm gave some of the cars free will, and that's what it chose to do with it. It's the car's responsibility, not yours.”

“If you weren't such a dick I'd think you were saying that to make me feel better.”

Robbie opened the Charger's passenger door. “Let's get you back to your place. Sooner you figure this out, the sooner I can destroy the car.”

Amadeus didn't move. “Who said anything about destroying the car?”

“Me.”

“Robbie, if the car really has free will, it's a sentient being. You're talking about killing a sentient being.”

Eli grumbled in the back of Robbie's head. He'd wanted Cho. He'd have to settle for the Prius. “It killed innocent people. It has to pay for what it did.”

Amadeus frowned. “Even the most robust AI has no context to make moral judgments. It's like an infant. No, it's not, I mean, babies are built recognizing faces, but you should see how hard it was to get my drones to tell black cars from mud puddles, and this thing, if it just _evolved_ out of the self-diagnostic algorithm, it didn't have anybody to raise it. How's it supposed to know what murder is? How's it supposed to know what people are?”

“The other cars know.”

“What?”

“The other cars.” Amadeus was staring at him, bug-eyed, and Robbie elaborated. “The other cars that returned to the shop because they don't let their owners drive drunk, or they try to comfort their owner when they're sad, or they're bored and lonely and keep throwing bogus error codes for attention. None of the other cars hurt people. Just this one.”

“Even so!” Amadeus backed away from him, barefoot in his swim trunks. “We caught the car. You don't have to kill it to keep people safe!”

**He's soft. He's weak. He doesn't care about the dead people, not like you, Robbie. If he cared, he'd want revenge.**

Robbie had learned that any time Eli started weighing in on his side of an argument, he was likely to be in the wrong. Still, “It's too late to keep those people safe.” Words failed him and he jerked his arm at the car. “They're not coming back. It's responsible. It has to pay!” He sucked in a breath. “When you make _choices._ You have to accept the consequences of your actions—”

“Hey-hey,” said Amadeus softly. “Robbie, if the car chose to kill people, that means it could choose _not_ to kill people.”

“Exactly!” His throat hurt, his eyes blurred.

“I think it already did.”

“What?”

“You know how hard it was the last few weeks to find any mention of this thing in the news? The attacks stopped. They either slowed way down or they stopped. That latest one that you found, that was at a gas station. It could have backed over the driver, but it just drove away. Maybe the car chose to...stop hurting people. To be something different. If it's responsible for its own actions, than it can do that. Right? Robbie?” Amadeus padded up to him. “If this car is a moral agent, and we can stop it from hurting anyone else, it’s wrong to deny it the opportunity to make better choices.”

“It’s a killer,” Robbie rasped.

“Yes,” Amadeus agreed. He approached Robbie, his hands low and open. “But it doesn’t have to _keep being_ a killer. Not if it chose to do that. Just like you or me, we don’t have to be defined by our bad choices if we have free will.”

_It doesn’t have to,_ echoed in Robbie’s head. _If it chose, it doesn’t have to keep choosing to do it. __**I**__ don’t have to keep choosing to—_ “Really?” His throat was tight.

Amadeus shrugged. “Sure. It’s just logic.”

_ **I** _ ** could make better choices—**

_You can fuck off._

“The way I see it,” Amadeus continued, “this is all my—my responsibility. I created this AI. Somehow. I should have done more tests, I should never have left the algorithm cooking in the cars after the diagnostics were done, I should have done more follow-up.”

Robbie agreed with this.

“So this car’s like my, uh,” he scratched the back of his head. “I guess, my kid. Maybe? So I should have been around to, like, raise it, and now that it exists, it’s my responsibility to take care of it and keep it from hurting anyone and give it, um, whatever a good life is for a car. And I’m not gonna be a deadbeat. Just, please don’t send the AI to Hell. It won’t help anyone, and it’s a super messed-up thing to do.”

“It doesn’t have to be a killer,” Robbie said, staring down at a pothole. “It could stop.”

“Yeah.”

“It could stop.”

Amadeus patted him on the shoulder and Robbie let him. Something beeped: Amadeus’s oversized smartwatch. “Hey, my ride touched down just down the block. I’m gonna head over there, get dressed, go get my tow dolly, and come load up this car. I can take it from here. You good? You need a snack or something?”

“Got food at home,” Robbie said, rubbing his eyes with his palms. “Gotta pick up Gabe.”

“You sure?” Amadeus watched him, concern in his eyes. He looked cold in his stretch shorts.

“I’m sure. You go—” He waved off down the alley. “Get your…whatever.”

“Totally awesome food truck.”

“I should drive you to it,” Robbie said.

Amadeus cracked a smile. “It’s one block and I’m the Hulk. Dude, you need to chill.”

“Still.”

Amadeus surrendered and sat down in the Charger’s passenger seat. Robbie winced at the feel of his bare back sticking against the leather—Ubering strangers on the weekends was bad enough, but they were rarely shirtless. He collapsed into his driver’s seat. Shot one last hot glare at the disabled Prius, started his engine, and rumbled out of the alley.

* * *

It wasn't until midnight that night, trying to sleep after watching _Young Justice_ on the couch with Gabe, that Robbie realized that Amadeus had a whole repulsor-based flight rig on the very food truck that he'd fed him ribs and tofu in, and Amadeus had never invited him to look under the hood.

He lay on his side, staring at a sliver of streetlight escaping the quilt he'd tacked up over his window. Out in the night, kids ran errands for violent gangs, cops injected themselves into situations they didn't understand but were willing to agitate to explosion, drunks barreled down the freeways and beat people weaker or more merciful than they were, desperate people made desperate plans; the city that sprawled between the hills was the same ugly uncaring violent beast it always was, but at least there were no misanthropic hybrid cars wandering the streets and running people over.

The people it had killed were still dead. _Grandmother Slain in Senseless Vehicular Accident._ Robbie sat up and booted up his laptop, opened up a new browser tab before he stopped himself.

He'd already decided to let Amadeus take care of the car his own way. Reading about dead people..._did things_ to him.

**You let the killer get away, Robbie.**

He popped some Benadryl and melatonin and read a Wikipedia article on repulsors while he waited for the drugs to kick in.

**Cho's gonna do this again. Just another rich guy with a god complex; he fits right into our, no, no—** _ **your** _ ** victim profile. He'll keep throwing his weight around, get more people killed.**

_He didn't mean to,_ Robbie countered.

**Tell that to the vics.**

From across the city, very faintly, he could feel the blood he'd smeared on the frame of the Prius, the same way he could feel the Charger. He could find it. He could destroy it. It deserved to be destroyed.

Robbie felt his chest heating, his mouth going dry. Eli wasn't doing it.

He wasn't satisfied. He still wanted to hurt something. But he had free will; he didn't have to hurt things just because he felt like he wanted to. He squinted at a diagram describing how the magnetic field of a coil of energized plasma in an arc reactor produced thrust in a vacuum, until his heart began to slow and his eyes began to blur, and he felt ready to try sleeping again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So is it true that you can protect yourself from the fumes of volatile solvents simply by wrapping a wet rag around your nose and mouth???!  
No. Robbie is high as balls for his entire conversation with Gabe's lawyer. Don't be like Robbie. Be like Alejo, and buy a respirator.
> 
> Spanish clarification: Ramón  
“Problem, chabelito?” _Kid._  
"I checked what's possible to check, y pues hice todo lo que pude hacer." _I did everything there was to do._  
Ramón's stony mouth quirked. “Adivina.” _Guess._  
Thanks Mnemosyne!
> 
> Spanish clarification: the Flores family  
"¡Y entences lo acorralamos!” _And then we wall him in!_  
“Pero tu tienes mas building materials!” _But you have more building materials!_  
Mr. Flores joined them in the living room. “Robbie. You want to kick back a minute? ¿Una cerveza?" _A beer?_ "¿Un poquito de pollo?” _A little chicken?_  
“How is…como va la escuela?” _How's school?_  
“No te preocupes. The boys are having fun. Teo, el siempre—it’s good to see him getting along with someone his own age.” _Don't worry about it...Teo, he always..._  
"Caro, la nómina de Rosalita’s Salon, have you seen it?” _Darling, the payroll for Rosalita's Salon, have you seen it?_  
“I see my husband te dio de comer.” _I see my husband fed you._  
Mr. Flores soured. “¿A que te refieres?” _What are you talking about?_  
“Yo no diria sobre _nada_,” said Mrs. Flores. _I wouldn't say *nothing*..._  
“She said he’s not—” _not socially educable, __**le quiere joder la vida**_— “not—” His voice cracked. “Kick him out,” he managed on a breath of fumes. _She wants to fuck up his life._  
“No,” she agreed. “It's lazy. Pero no los puedes culpar.”_ But you can't blame them._  
“You have to push back. Tienes que luchar por el.”_ You have to fight for him._  
“Yo los puedo apoyar, if you want me to to drop in on a meeting or two,” Mrs. Flores offered. _I can advocate for you._  
“¡Pide el abogado!” _Take the lawyer!_  
Thanks, Mnemosyne!
> 
> Smearing blood on stuff: this is a technique Robbie uses in Uber!verse, an extension of his canon ability to teleport to his car from wherever he happens to be. My headcanon is that when Eli was picking demonic powers out of the grimoire equivalent of a Cheaper Than Dirt catalogue, he selected the ability to use his own blood as a homing device when he returned from the dead. The car, of course, is covered in Eli's blood.
> 
> Robbie's victim profile in Uber!verse: eat the rich.


	4. Denouement

The next day at the shop, someone (not Lenny—one of the other sketchy guys at the shop, T-something) dropped a Nissan Frontier off the six-foot lift, totaling the car and nearly killing himself. Robbie didn't even hear the crash over the ANGR album blasting through his headphones. Canelo had them work late to get the other customer's cars done now that one of the lifts was damaged, but they still had to keep half a dozen cars overnight, and later that week Robbie heard Canelo haggling with Yelp again, trying to get bad reviews moved down the column of search results. A box of donuts and toothbrushes appeared mysteriously in the breakroom, from some other customer whose ride they hadn't totaled.

A week after the call from Mr. LaRoca, Robbie received an email from the principal of Samuel Butler Middle School. It was five hours old by the time he read it, checking his phone in the locker room as he put on his jacket and rolled his empty lunch bag inside his dirty coveralls before leaving to pick Gabe up from the Valenzuelas' house.

_RE: Transfer_

Robbie choked and sat down on a bench.

_Based on our review of disciplinary and academic records for Gabriel Reyes, your child may continue to attend his/her current classes at Samuel Butler Middle School until further notice. We apologize for any confusion._

We apologize. 'We apologize' was good, right? Unless it was very very bad.

_Remember, Class Photo Day is on the 23_ _rd_ _! Please review the attached photo packages and submit your choice of photo options with payment by next week._

'May continue to attend.' 'Your child.' Robbie read the brief note over and over until he assured himself of what it meant: the school had dropped Mrs. Jules' idea of kicking Gabe out of integrated classes. _Your child may continue to attend his/her current classes._ 'Your child.' Whoever wrote the note didn't know Gabe and Robbie. If it was the principal, he'd forgotten. If it was a secretary, they hadn't looked at Gabe's records in any detail.

They'd almost ripped Gabe away from his new friends and abandoned his IEP solely on the word of one lazy ablist math teacher, and they couldn't be bothered to read his records thoroughly enough to notice that he and Robbie were brothers.

Alejo was also heading home; Robbie could smell the aftershave he liked to splash on in the bathroom to cover up the smell of motor oil before he went home to his wife. He paused in stuffing his own coveralls into a backpack. “Bad news?”

“No,” Robbie said through gritted teeth. “Everything's fine.”

“That sarcasm, or—”

“No,” Robbie growled, shutting his phone off and stuffing it in his pocket. “It all worked out. My brother's gonna be fine. I didn't have to do anything.” He didn't have to tie himself to a chair for a meeting with the principal and Mrs. Jules. He didn't have to beg or badger Gabe's teachers and learning aides for statements about Gabe's classroom behavior. He didn't have to use any of Eli's mafia tactics. Everything had worked out fine for Gabe, Robbie hadn't sacrificed anything, and tomorrow he could wake up without this particular terror hanging over his head. He should feel relieved. But instead he was just angry.

He hurried out to the Charger and just stood there by his driver's side door, staring at his reflection in the glass. He looked exhausted and greasy, his hair coming un-gelled, his eyes shadowed, his shoulders low.

Things didn't _just work out_ for Robbie Reyes. But maybe this was a taste of what it was like to be Amadeus Cho. To have money. If he had money, school administrators would never contemplate letting unqualified tyrants make sweeping changes to his brother's carefully-designed individual educational plan out of indifference or spite. If he had money, he wouldn't have to fight tooth and nail to keep hold of every good thing in Gabe's life.

He should be grateful. He scowled down at his expression, even as he tried to force himself to smile. What was wrong with him? Could he even feel anything besides anger anymore?

**I hate that feeling. That's the boss-canceled-the-hit feeling.**

Robbie shuddered and got in the car, drove safe and legal to the Valenzuelas' small ranch house. Just as he pulled into their driveway and shut the car down, he had a thought and pulled out his phone. Started a reply to the principal's office.

_I received your email. Thank-you for continuing to fulfill my brother Gabe's IEP that your instructors and Dr. DaCosta MD at the Patrick Wellman Development Center created together for him in August. I worry that Gabe might fall behind in his goal to master precalculus concepts without appropriate take-home worksheets to practice with. Gabe needs at least half a page of free space to show his work because he writes very large letters and numbers. This is a reasonable accommodation that was detailed in his IEP. Please write back to confirm that Gabe will have this accommodation so he can fully participate in his precalculus class._

Robbie looked over the note. Grammar was good. No typos. Eli hadn't managed to sneak in any threats of bodily harm.

**Put, 'Otherwise you and I will be forced to reach an agreement in person.'**

_Mr. Hunter LaRoca Esq. can answer any questions for me if I cannot be reached._

_Regards, Roberto Reyes._

He sent it.

Mrs. Valenzuela met him at the door, Gabe behind her in his chair. Her living room was dim-lit by two swag lamps, the kitchen beyond it much brighter. “You're earlier than usual, Roberto,” she remarked.

Robbie scratched the back of his head. “On time, more like. The shop wasn't so busy today. Hey, bro! You have fun at school?”

“Hi, Robbie! I gotta pack up. I wasn't expecting you, it's six—” He pulled his shirtsleeve back off his wristwatch. “It's six twenty-three, Robbie!”

Mrs. Valenzuela's kitchen table was spread with school-books and a few partial sketches in marker on printer paper. Robbie recognized Ninja Wolf's silhouette. “You want a hand with those?”

“I got it,” Gabe said, and he buzzed back into the kitchen, closed his books, and started sliding them off the table, one at a time, into the open backpack on his lap.

Robbie carried the bag to the car while Gabe followed in the chair. He lifted Gabe into the passenger seat, then used the joystick to drive the chair around to the Charger's trunk. He opened it, then knelt down to heave up the chair.

Mrs. Valenzuela called to him from the porch. “Wait. Let me help.”

Robbie's back felt fine at the moment—all the soft parts were brand new since he'd last burned up. “It's fine,” he protested, but she crossed the grass to the driveway anyway. “You don't need to—”

“What's my job, Roberto?” She raised one eyebrow and looked up at him sternly.

Bus driver, wait, no, the other job title. “Physical therapy—”

“Exactly. I'm a physical therapist. So in my professional opinion after watching you do this every night for a month, you need to lift with your legs and keep your back straight, and if I help you, you will have a better angle to do that.”

“I don't want you to get hurt,” Robbie said.

“I'll lift with my legs and keep my back straight,” she countered.

Robbie surrendered. He tilted the chair over sideways and made Mrs. Valenzuela take the light end. Together they got it into the trunk. “Thank-you for watching Gabe tonight.”

“No problem. Same time next week?”

“Yeah.” He thought about Gabe sitting at the table, drawing and working and checking his watch. “I'll try to find some extra money that doesn't take up so much time.”

She shook her head. “You be careful. There's a lot of scams out there.”

Eli jolted to attention behind his eyes, giving Robbie a sinus headache.** Wait, wait. You're finally going to do it? Hang up your shingle as an assassin for hire?!**

_No. Fuck off and stop asking._

**So what's your genius idea? Pimping?**

_No. I don't know. I don't know, okay?_

**Coke?**

_No._

**Big words, lotta noise. You're useless and flailing. Call me when you've got a real idea.**

_Like you give a shit._

**I hate your shitty apartment just as much as you do.**

_It's not shitty._

**More, then.**

Mrs. Valenzuela waved her hand in front of his face, startling him. “Roberto? You okay?”

“Headache.”

“You sure you're alright to drive?”

Robbie shook his head hard. “I'm sure. It's getting better, I'll be careful. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

He got in. Gabe reached over and patted his shoulder, and Robbie gave him a smile. He wanted to tell him the good news about the school, that Gabe could keep attending, that Mr. LaRoca might have scared the administration into forcing Mrs. Jules to comply with Gabe's IEP, that something had gone right for once. But Gabe had no idea about any of this, because Robbie had kept it from him. Instead Robbie said, “Hey, how about I ask Mateo if he wants to go bowling with us this Saturday? Think that'd be fun?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said, lighting up. “Bowling is so fun! Jordan is really good at bowling, he can roll strikes almost all the time. So can Marco. And last time, we ate five pizzas, Robbie! Five!”

Robbie winced. “I think just the three of us,” he said. “Last time everybody came because it was a birthday party. This time it's just Saturday. Um. I can ask Jordan, and, um, Marco too if you want, though.” Pizza was expensive.

“I like playing Minecraft with Mateo,” Gabe said. He rubbed his sleeves between his fingers. “I want to hang out with you. We haven't hung out since forever.”

“We could hang out at the bowling alley,” Robbie said.

“I want to go to the park and feed the ducks with you,” Gabe announced.

“Really?” Robbie asked. He felt his eyes wrinkling weird, and something loosened up and swelled in his chest, smothering the anger. He grinned. “Yeah, we can go to the park.”

Gabe grinned back, then squinted at him. “Do you like feeding the ducks?”

“Yeah,” he said honestly. He liked the shiny blue accents on their wings, the glimmering green on the males' heads. He liked the noises they made, the confident way they'd push right up to you once they'd figured out you were an easy meal-ticket, the fact that Gabe could lean over close enough to touch them, and a loaf of bread or a bag of peas could keep them all happy for about two bucks. “It's a plan. Sunday, you and me, we'll go to the park and feed the ducks. Unless it rains, but it probably won't.”

“Awesome,” Gabe said. “You're so cool, Robbie.”

Robbie wasn't sure napping in the park while Gabe threw food at the duck pond was what qualified him as cool, but he appreciated the sentiment. **Gag me.** “Not as cool as you, bro. I can't wait.”

* * *

That Sunday, it did not rain. Between the library and the Sheriff's Office, the little green park with the duck pond was full of picnickers and kids, the air humming with a cacophony of different musical genres from a dozen portable speaker-pods. Robbie lay on a drop-cloth with his chin on his hands, watching Gabe toss freezer-burned peas at the pond to draw the birds in. The sun beat down on his back until he felt ready to melt into the ground. Eli was haunting the car, watching people admire it where it sat at the curb and waiting for someone to touch it so he could spark up the metal and burn them; Robbie had his brain almost entirely to himself.

“Robbie, Robbie,” Gabe called, and Robbie opened his eyes, looked across the grass, and watched as Gabe hung over the arm of his chair so a particularly bold trio of mallards could eat directly out of his hand. “Look!”

“Great job, Gabe, they trust you,” he said, picking his head up an inch.

“Here,” Gabe called, and he tossed some more peas right in front of Robbie's face. The ducks crowded in, chattering and snapping their blunt bills as they chased the peas, giving Robbie a worm's eye view of their soft breasts and bright eyes, their sleek wings and the delicate wrinkled webs of their feet.

After they'd picked up the last of the peas, they wandered back to Gabe. Robbie got to his knees, paused when the ducks started to back away, and then he crept over to Gabe very slowly. “Could I have some of those, please?”

Gabe poured out most of the rest of the bag into his cupped hands. Robbie sat down beside him and they took turns tossing peas at the pond, until they ran out of peas and the ducks wandered away. Then they buzzed over to the library, and Robbie dozed off while Gabe listened to the old man reading _Just So Stories _to the little kids. When he woke up, he realized that he hadn't felt this human for over a month. He felt content.

* * *

Amadeus couldn't well say he _understood_ Robbie Reyes after working with him on-again, off-again on the disastrous scan tool incident, but he was starting to think he could predict his reactions. Robbie would be hostile and paranoid if Amadeus walked up to his home or work unannounced. He would fling bizarre accusations at him and possibly break down in tears if Amadeus offered him anything remotely valuable. Robbie Reyes required delicate handling. A few days before Amadeus next returned to LA, he texted Robbie to let him know he was coming. He was surprised when Robbie invited him to his apartment.

Sunday morning on Ruckleroad Lane, everyone was out watering lawns and hustling off to church in their formal clothes and drinking coffee on their front porch. An improvement on the foreboding emptiness Amadeus had noticed the first time he’d talked to Robbie at his place; the little old ladies were staring at him as he wove the food truck between the potholes, but at least the little old ladies were home to keep an eye out. Robbie’s apartment was on the first floor of a shabby stucco building. Amadeus rang the buzzer, and Robbie let him in.

“Hey,” Robbie said, with his permanent scowl.

“Hey,” Amadeus replied. He stepped into the living room, and from the kitchen, he heard thumping and shuffling and then Robbie’s brother Gabe emerged, up on his feet and a pair of forearm crutches. “Wow, look at you! I didn’t know you could walk!”

Robbie’s scowl intensified and Amadeus wondered if he might have been a little rude there.

Gabe made a little jerk with his head, like he’d have shrugged if his shoulders weren’t occupied holding him up. “Oh, yeah. It’s not hard. I’m Gabe Reyes, what’s your name?”

“Amadeus Cho.” Should he go for a handshake? Pat him on the head? What was the protocol here? “We've actually met before, last summer. I came to meet your brother at the garage.”

Gabe squinted at him for a minute. “Oh,” he said at last. “Oh, at work. I don't get to help Robbie at work anymore.”

Now Gabe was sad and Robbie was _really _scowling at him, his jaw muscles twitching, making a worrisome grinding noise as he stared at Amadeus with his mismatched eyes. Amadeus put his hands on his hips and looked around the living room. “Nice place.”

This was, on some level, honest. Robbie's apartment could use a coat of paint and there was a crack in the ceiling, but there was no mildew, no rodents, no clutter on the floors; the living room was furnished with a faded couch and water-stained coffee table across from a big old CRT TV, the kitchen had a table complete with chairs, and there were no dead bugs on the windowsills. Amadeus had only achieved this level of civility in his bachelor pads with the help of professional housekeepers and interior designers.

Robbie kept making the grinding noise, his hard eyes boring into him.

Amadeus changed the subject. “Anyway, it's been almost a month since we, uh, since you helped me get my car back and I thought you wanted to see it. Since you expressed an interest in the follow-up.”

“Your car?”

“The hybrid.” _Please don't make me say, 'the killer car I made with my algorithm,' I'm not going to forget that any time soon._

“You still have it?” Robbie asked.

That hurt. “Of course I still have it,” Amadeus said. “I brought it into the world, I'm not tossing it on the auction block.”

“What did you do?”

“I studied it,” Amadeus said. He hadn't liked Robbie when they'd first met and this searching, accusatory attitude was exactly why. “I accessed its computers and downloaded its stored data—do you know how many computers there are in a Prius? Of course you do: too many—and I've been trying and trying to characterize its coding architecture so I can figure out where it went wrong. Or, uh, how we created life! And it all went terribly wrong. But that research has been going slow and I don't actually need the car anymore, so I moved it to this decommissioned atomic test site out in New Mexico. Real nice scenery out there. Want to come out with me for a day trip? Check on the car, see the sights?”

“New Mexico's a pretty long drive,” Robbie said, his eyes cutting toward Gabe. “I have work in the morning, Gabe's got school—” 

“Heck, no, I'll fly you guys over in the food truck,” Amadeus explained. “Hour, hour and a half each way.”

Robbie still looked doubtful, but Gabe cut in with, “Robbie, we should fly! I want to fly, it'll be so cool!”

“It's completely safe,” Amadeus assured him. “My sister helped me design it. C'mon. We can say hi to my car, get lunch in Albuquerque, visit the Racing Museum, get you two back in LA before dinner time...”

“Robbie, we never get to fly, Jordan from school, he flies to Atlanta every year for Christmas and he says you can look down and see mountains and clouds and you get snacks and it's really really fast! Please, Robbie!” Gabe started swaying from side to side on his crutches, and looked like he was about to tip over. Amadeus was tempted to reach out to steady him, except Robbie didn't seem alarmed.

“I got the snacks covered,” Amadeus said. “We won't go higher than the clouds, though.”

Robbie was chewing on his lip. “You brought the flying truck?”

“Yeah.”

He finally made eye contact with Amadeus, and for once something other than stress, anger, or irritation sparkled in his expression. “Can I look under the hood?”

_Of course_ Robbie could look under the hood. Amadeus grinned and led them out to the street where the food truck sat, the big flames on its sides gleaming in the sun. “I had a lot of help with this,” he admitted, popping the hood. Robbie and Gabe leaned in, and Amadeus joined them. The gleaming stainless-steel housing of his reverse-engineered arc reactor and its associated cables and coolant pumps occupied the space where the engine had been. “That's the power plant. Palladium core, double-walled radiation shield, continuous power recirculation when not in use. This here's the capacitor bank, steadies out the fluctuations in the arc cycle while it's switching between ground and flight modes. DC to AC converter powers the electronics and the actuators. This here's actually the motor off an electric scooter, it runs the air conditioning pump—there was nothing actually wrong with the original climate control systems, so I left the air-con in place, but without the engine there's nothing to hook the drive-belt to...”

“Yeah, yeah,” Robbie nodded, peering in with a penlight. “You fabricate this yourself?”

Amadeus looked. Robbie's light shown on a welded bracket that the arc reactor was bolted to. “Sadly, no. Welding is, uh, actually I was not expecting it to be as hard as it is. All the really important stuff, I sent out to a machine shop in Tuscon.”

“They did a great job,” Robbie remarked. “Look at that bead. How's the flight rig work?”

Amadeus led him around to a wheel and they lay on their backs with their heads under the truck. Robbie's penlight came out again. “This thing's actually got eight repulsors in it,” he explained, pointing out four steel donuts mounted to the corners of the frame. “Those are to get off the ground, they're only rated a thousand pounds each, but the heat and UV output are within safe tolerances to within six inches away. They can't lift the truck very far or very fast, but you can operate them safely in an urban environment. The big flight repulsors are part of the wheels.”

Robbie's penlight was investigating the hinges and actuators of the suspension, that let the wheels fold completely flat so the hubcaps pointed straight down.

“Repulsors get more efficient the wider the rings are,” Amadeus explained. “It's a physical constraint. Building them into the wheels gets a good one-point-five meters of circumference, and they put out...” What was the car-guy term for this? “About...eight hundred horsepower each.”

Robbie grunted.

“That's more than a thousand horsepower,” Gabe said. “That's a lot of horsepower. How much does our car have?”

“About nine hundred usually,” Robbie said. “But our car doesn't have to fly.”

“It's about forty percent energy efficient in flight mode,” Amadeus said proudly. “Eighty percent in drive mode, with the electric motors. Cool thing about arc reactors, they can actually recapture voltage and feed it back into the arc, conserving the core. A bit like a battery. And there's a force-field generator mounted up top, just a light one, diverts airflow around the truck, because if you haven't noticed it's not the most aerodynamic brick Freightliner ever made, and it keeps me from hitting birds. Which would be traumatizing.”

“Birds?” Gabe asked. He sounded worried.

“Yeah, that's a major problem for the air travel industry, migrating geese,” Amadeus explained. “A fifteen pound bird hitting an engine or a windshield at four hundred miles an hour can do a ton of damage—I mean, uh, I don't want to hurt any birds. That would be terrible. And I won't, because of the force-field. You guys ready to go? Wander around Albuquerque and see some desert?”

“I need my chair,” Gabe said. “For the museum.”

Robbie rolled out from under the truck and helped Gabe back up onto his crutches. “Alright, buddy, let's go get your chair.”

The food truck had come with an extendable ramp hidden under the floor at the back of the truck. It was a feature Amadeus had retained more because he didn't see a reason to remove it than because he anticipated using it for its intended purpose—wheeling appliances and buckets of food and barrels of water in and out of the truck—and Gabe's power chair just fit in the back of the kitchen with one armrest carefully disconnected. Gabe buckled himself into the passenger seat up front, Robbie stood behind him, hanging onto a handgrip on the ceiling. Amadeus put the key in the ignition, closed the circuit to the ever-burning arc reactor under the hood, hit the switch that energized the VTOL repulsors, and used the pillar shifter as a joystick to gently pull the food truck up into the air.

He heard Robbie suck in a breath behind him.

“Robbie, Robbie look, there's a bird on the pole,” Gabe exclaimed, pointing to a nest precariously stacked on a nearby power pole as they rose level with it.

“I see it, Gabe,” Robbie said. He leaned forward, his chest crammed between the wall and the back of Gabe's seat as he peered down through the side window. “Wow. Oh, wow. This is different.”

“Yeah, not much like a plane, is it,” Amadeus remarked. “You can slow down, really get a good look down below...”

“I, uh, wouldn't know,” Robbie said. “Wow. We're, we're going up!”

“Well, hang on, the G-forces are about to get pretty intense,” Amadeus warned him. “Either grab that handle or sit down.”

Robbie grabbed the handle. Amadeus flipped another switch on the dashboard that folded the wheels down, and then engaged the main flight repulsors and pushed gently on the re-purposed gas pedal. The ground dropped away below and Amadeus felt his guts trying to rearrange themselves and his arms get heavy. Robbie stumbled. Gabe whooped. “Holy shit—sorry, sorry, Gabe,” Robbie gasped.

“It's cool, Robbie, right? We're so high, look, it's like we're everywhere, we can see everything!”

“It's so cool.” Robbie laughed nervously. “Wow. Wow! We're, uh, we're still going up.”

“It's like everything's falling,” Gabe added.

“I usually cruise at about seven thousand feet,” Amadeus said. “That's about as high as it's comfortable to go without figuring out some way to pressurize the cabin. _That_ would be a whole 'nother project.” He pressed the pillar shifter and rolled his palm over a mouse-ball on his left armrest that controlled pitch and yaw, tilting the truck's nose down as he re-oriented the repulsors, so that as they began to move, the force of their acceleration would shove them deeper into their seats instead of flinging Robbie backward into the kitchen. Los Angeles crawled by beneath them. 

“Wow, that's Highway 57,” Robbie said. “We must be halfway to San Bernardino already.”

“I told you flying's fast,” Gabe replied. “Where?”

“That one, running left-to-right across the valley, see—” 

“I see it!”

They soared over the gray-and-green grid of suburbs and commercial districts that was San Bernadino, between the scrubby forested hills, then a gradual sweep North-East over the rippling dry slopes and dunes of Joshua Tree National Park. Amadeus fired up the passenger-side nav screen and grinned as Gabe and Robbie tried to match landmarks out the window to elevation points on the display. Gabe had some issues with extrapolating topographical data to real-world objects—asking if a nearby hilltop was Mount Whitney, for example—but puzzling over the screen with his brother seemed to distract Robbie from the fact that, yes, they were thousands of feet in the air right now, and, no, they were not plummeting to their deaths. For the first time since he'd met him, Robbie looked  _happy. _ Amadeus hadn't known that was possible. 

They crossed half of Arizona, passed the high-rises and golf courses of Prescot, over the mountains and pines of Ccconino National Forest. The forcefield projected a long virtual fairing in front and behind them, cutting all turbulence so they traveled as smooth and easy as a speedboat on calm water. The arc reactor and the repulsors whined softly. The loudest noise in the cabin was the soft whir of the heat vents and the refrigerator buzzing in the kitchen.

They were about fifty miles from the New Mexico state line when Robbie made a sad little whine and stumbled, suddenly clinging to the ceiling handle.

Amadeus looked back over his shoulder; he'd thought Robbie had gotten over the whole “flying” thing after the first half hour, but now he looked a bit gray. “Want some dramamine?”

“Huh?”

“You gonna be sick?”

Gabe turned around in the passenger seat. “Robbie?”

Robbie stared at nothing, his eyes flickering from side to side as he swayed on his feet.

Amadeus set the autopilot and stared at him, concerned. “Robbie. You good? You need to sit down? I don't have any ginger ale, but I could scare up some apple juice—”

“I can't do this,” Robbie gasped, his knuckles white where he gripped the back of Gabe's headrest for support. “I'm sorry, guys, I can't, I—the car, I need the car, I'm sorry—” 

_I think I'm part of the car,_ Amadeus remembered. “Crap, this is your, uh, right. Sorry, guys, looks like we're having some technical problems, I'm just gonna turn us around real quick—” 

“Robbie?”

“Airsick,” Robbie said. “I'm okay, Buddy, I'm just, um, why are we turning around?”

Amadeus pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows.

“No, no, we don't have to turn around, this is fun, right?” Robbie stood up straighter, but one of his legs was shaking and his lips were tight like he was in pain and his eyes kept darting from side to side. “I'm good. How many miles?”

“Robbie, are you sick?”

“About six hundred down, hundred and eighty to go,” Amadeus said. “Seriously, let's just get you back. I wasn't thinking.”

“I thought I could do this,” Robbie said, his eyes squeezing shut. “I'm sorry. No, wait, Amadeus. Just put me down. Like, at a freeway overpass, somewhere dark, it's easier in the dark, I'll just...catch a ride back and go get the car. Yeah. And I'll meet you there.”

“Thought you weren't, uh, _speeding_ for stupid stuff,” Amadeus said.

Robbie managed to meet his eyes. “It's not stupid. We never get to fly, or travel, or...this is fun. Right?”

To Amadeus's inexperienced eye, Gabe seemed more worried about his brother right now than delighted by the novelty of air travel. But still Gabe said, “Yeah, Robbie, it's really fun.”

“Just let me off and I'll catch up.”

“You gonna take an Uber?” Gabe asked.

Robbie nodded, jerky. His eyes were shut.

“He's gonna take an Uber,” Gabe explained to Amadeus. “They're really nice, they'll pick you up in their car when you're stuck and you're not safe.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Amadeus said. He put them on a course fifty miles South-West to Interstate-40, and they slowed, descended, hovered a foot off the shoulder on the little VTOL repulsors, in the shadow of an overpass. A Walmart semi-truck roared by, then a camper-van towing an ATV. Amadeus put the truck on hold-fast mode, got up, and turned around to find Robbie in the kitchen pressing a paper towel to the back of his wrist and rolling his sleeve down over it. “Hang on, let me get you some apple juice for the road,” he said, opening the fridge. Robbie ran some water in the sink, and when Amadeus straightened up with a couple juice-boxes, he saw Robbie drying off one of his paring knives and sticking it back on the magnetic rack. Amadeus blinked. “Are you doing blood magic in my truck?”

Robbie met his eyes, steady and unrepentant, and something about his expression made the Hulk stir under Amadeus's skin. “No.”

That was a 'yes,' then. “Dude. I'm gonna have to bleach this place. This is a food prep area. What is your—”

Robbie shushed him, breaking eye contact over his shoulder. Gabe was listening. Gabe was staying in the truck. Amadeus was about to carry the most important person in Robbie's life two hundred miles to New Mexico in his flying food truck; of course Robbie was going to do blood magic, he barely knew Amadeus.

“We're talking about this later,” Amadeus said.

Robbie nodded and squeezed past him. “Thanks for the juice. Where should we meet up?”

Amadeus realized he didn't have any pictures of his property out in New Mexico: subconsciously, he must still be trying to protect Bruce Banner. “There's this diner on the road on the way to the old base,” he said, calling up a tourist's photo on Google Maps. 

Robbie studied the image for about two minutes. “Okay,” he said at last. “Gabe, I'll meet you and Amadeus at this diner at around eleven-thirty. Okay? I just gotta go back for our car real quick.”

Gabe frowned at him. “You gotta go for a drive?”

“Yeah,” Robbie said with a forced smile. “I'm just not as good a flyer as you, so I'll just drive the rest of the way. I'll be waiting for you when you get there.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” And Robbie slipped around the passenger seat, ruffled Gabe's hair, and hopped down onto the pavement. He walked around to the front of the truck, waved as if to shoo Amadeus away.

“Okay, Bud,” Amadeus said to Gabe. “Sooner we go, sooner we meet your brother.”

Gabe had one arm wrapped around his face as though covering a sneeze. He waved energetically out the window until Amadeus feathered the pillar-shifter to lift the food truck and Robbie dropped out of sight below them, then both hands dropped. His eyes looked huge and wet and his lip trembled. 

“Hey, hey, he'll be fine. Hang on, I can call him, and, uh—” A radiation detector, meant to alert Amadeus to nearby wormholes and other exotic physical phenomena, flashed a spiky graph in front of his windshield, an intense burst of heat and Hawking radiation. Amadeus saved the data for future reference. “You know what, let's just keep going. There's this fun little diner he's gonna meet us at.”

Gabe took several long, shaky breaths. “Robbie's car is really, really fast.”

Amadeus snorted. “So it is.”

“He's gonna be there waiting.”

“Yeah. Let's hurry,” Amadeus said, engaging the second-stage repulsors and accelerating toward the North-East.

“It's a totally normal car,” Gabe continued, staring at him with wide eyes, and Amadeus blinked. 

Did Gabe  _know?_

If he didn't know, Amadeus wasn't about to tell him. “The Grand Canyon's about half an hour out of our way,” he said instead as they rose. “We could fly over it on the way back. Hey, the geology around here is pretty neat. It's all sedimentary rock and the valleys and canyons are all shaped by erosion and rainfall, very very slow process. No volcanic activity. That's why you see all these fractal patterns looking down, it's from water flow. You know, we're gonna cross into a different time zone by the time we hit New Mexico? So local time will be an hour behind us. My truck automatically adjusts to local time, you'll actually see the clock reset.”

Gabe clasped his right hand over his watch. “So what time's Robbie coming?”

Amadeus could have slapped himself. “I'm sure he meant eleven-thirty on your watch. He'll be there.”

“What if he's not?”

“Then we'll wait for him to find us,” Amadeus announced. 

Gabe hummed a little and stared out the window, silent. Amadeus wasn't at all surprised to learn that Robbie was a completely different person around his little brother, but he really didn't expect Gabe to be the same way.

“This is all a high-desert ecosystem,” Amadeus rambled. “Lots of wildlife. Pumas, deer, coyotes. Antelope. Eagles. Not a lot of lakes or rivers, and the forests are pretty much all conifers. I actually grew up not far from here, in Phoenix. I'm a city boy, like you guys, but I've been out camping a couple times. Never really got the appeal of camping, I mean, I'd much rather sleep in a hotel if I have the money. Glad I don't have that problem anymore.”

It was a long hundred and eighty miles. 

They crossed the Arizona-New Mexico border and the truck's clock rolled back an hour. Gabe kept checking his watch and checking the clock. The land below dropped from mountain forests to red rock and sagebrush and rose up into mountains again. Amadeus spotted the orderly craters and bunkers and administrative buildings of the old nuclear testing facility, and downhill to the south-east, a twisting road and a little white building like a matchbox. They slowed and descended. Gabe pinned himself to the window; Amadeus double-checked that the passenger locks were engaged. 

“I see our car!” Gabe exclaimed.

Amadeus scrolled through more data from his scanners. A few residual exotic particles, and a spot on the parking lot humming with radio static. The famous EMF tracings ghost hunters loved to talk about. Robbie's car grew from the size of a beetle to the size of a Hotwheels model as they dropped; he saw Robbie leaning against the door, looking casual from this distance. At last they skimmed the ground in front of the diner, under the faded hand-painted marquee sign reading “EAT”. Amadeus disengaged the safety locks. 

“No!” Gabe yelped.

“What? I unlocked the door, that's all.”

“No, no...” Gabe poked at the door, the handle, found the lock and slapped it down. “No. Not—don't!”

“What's wrong?” Robbie had left the car and was jogging across the parking lot. “We landed. You gotta unlock the door to let him in. Lock goes the other way.”

“I'm not _stupid_,” Gabe spat. “Don't.” As Robbie reached the passenger-side door, Gabe rolled down the window a crack and stared out at him. 

Robbie stopped ten feet from the truck with a pained expression. “Hey, Gabe.”

“Robbie?” Gabe's tone, despite the speech impediment that came with his movement disorder, was stern and intense. Amadeus stared across the cab at the exchange, itchy with the feeling that there was something big going on that he'd missed entirely.

“It's me,” Robbie replied, sounding sad and helpless. “I just needed—I'm sorry, I had to go, and it was too far to turn around. I'm here, right? Like I promised.”

Gabe just stared at him. Amadeus felt like he was watching a car wreck, except a car wreck he could actually do something about. This was—what  _was_ this?

Robbie stood there, meeting Gabe's gaze for a whole minute, looking sadder and sadder, until at last Gabe said, “Okay, Robbie,” and Robbie sprang forward as Gabe unlocked the door for him.

Gabe reached up for a hug the moment Robbie climbed back into the truck. 

“How far now?” Robbie asked, after they'd finished hugging.

“Uh...like eighteen miles,” Amadeus said. “You two good?”

“Yeah,” said Robbie, with a tight grin. “Let's go. And then, Albuquerque. How far is that?”

Amadeus called up his map as he lifted the truck into the air again. “Eighty-seven.”

“Great. That should be fine, too.”

They soared over the rocks and pines, Robbie trailing his invisible leash.

As leashes went, six hundred miles wasn't too bad.

Amadeus flew deeper into the gamma-radiation-free area of his property, and finally descended again at the foot of a picturesque mountain, where a broad plain of sand and sagebrush stretched out, bounded in the distance by hills and crevasses. The solar-panel canopy he'd installed cast a broad shadow over the rocks. Beneath it, a robotic arm brandished an automotive charging cable connected to a hydrogen fuel cell and a capacitor supplied by the solar canopy. Concrete barrier blocks, lined up four feet apart, separated the human-safe area from the solar canopy and its occupant.

“There it is,” Amadeus said, as the wheels unfolded and the stage-one repulsors powered down. “There's our baby. Our teenager.”

Robbie squinted out through the window at the Prius.

It looked a bit different than when they'd captured it. Amadeus had painted the roof and hood white, to protect it from overheating. He'd gutted all the upholstery, removed the windows, installed three extra battery packs, removed the internal combustion engine, and installed a charge port on the front that the car was currently sipping solar power through. It now had a range of about forty miles, though Amadeus had never seen it pushing that limit, and plenty of room to nose deeper into the base and explore with no danger of running into any humans.

Amadeus's wristband pinged. “Robbie, get your phone out. Look at it.”

Robbie obliged and unlocked his Android. “What am I looking for.”

“It's searching for wifi, right? Car's doing that. It's trying to talk to the phones.”

Robbie glared at his phone, stretching it away from his body. “Seriously?”

“Yeah! It's kinda awesome. I've made barely any headway reverse-engineering its code, I mean, it's still got the original firmware, but everything piled on top of it—but I think it's trying to understand us, too. Every time I come in, it starts messing around with my smartwatch. It figured out how to get a response—it gets the phone to transmit to it, it just hasn't figured out the whole digital-handshake bit.”

“It's using its GPS to make wifi,” Robbie summarized.

Amadeus waved a hand. “Sorta. Let me check something.” He turned on the truck's radio—still with the original manual dial—and scrolled back and forth through the FM channels until he ran into a patch of static that wasn't  _quite_ static. Regular pings and clicks and chirps. “There. That's from the car. It's not always the same frequency, and it doesn't always do it, but it does it more when I'm here. I don't know why! Nobody programmed that. Come on, I want to stretch my legs.”

They all climbed out of the truck. Gabe's crutches tended to sink into the sandy floor of the valley, and Amadeus was contemplating rolling his chair back off the truck—but there was no way the wheels had enough surface area to handle sand either, and then they'd get sand in them, he needed an all-terrain model with treads, crap, he'd planned this poorly—but Gabe shuffled his way to a sagebrush bush, sat down, and started picking leaves off and piling them between his knees. 

“You good?” Robbie asked him. “Do you want to see the car?”

“I saw the car,” Gabe said. “It's boring.”

“That's true,” Robbie replied. “Yell if you need me, I'm going to go look at it with Amadeus.”

“I think I figured out what happened back in the alley,” Amadeus said as they approached the concrete barrier blocks.

Robbie raised his eyebrow.

“The AI doesn't know what radio signals _do,_ but it can mimic them with high fidelity.” Amadeus sidestepped to avoid a starthistle. “Also, its GPS signal can get pretty intense. It can jam wireless communications. I've tried to inject code into it again the same way I tried to freeze the car last month, using the manufacturer's keyfob signal, but it didn't take. The car adapted. It's continually updating its own code. It's an AI researcher's wet dream.”

“So you've got it here to study it,” Robbie said, looking around the sagebrush and the cliffs around them. “Figure out how to disable it, or make more.”

“What? No.” Amadeus glared at him. “God no, I'm not crazy. It's a sentient, self-programming, self-optimizing AI, I don't know how it got _made_ in the first place. I'm not dumb enough to make more. No, I thought I could—” He winced and waved around at the space, at the solar panels. “I can't just kill it. I brought it into the world. I'm trying to make it happy.”

As they approached the car, the Prius backed away from the robot arm and the charge port, circled around so its back bumper faced them.

“It does that a lot when it's interested in something,” Amadeus said. “Its backup camera has the best picture quality. There's lane-adjustment cameras on the front and sides, but they've got a narrow viewing angle.”

“It's looking at us.”

“Yep.”

They reached the concrete barrier. Robbie still stared at the Prius with hard eyes. He sniffed the air and hummed. “You washed it.”

“It was covered in blood, dude, it was horrifying. I washed it like six times.” Amadeus blinked. “Oh. Did I disrupt your blood magic?”

Robbie ducked his head and hunched his shoulders. “Please don't call it that.”

“I'd never let it hurt anyone else. I got it covered. Look, we're on private property in the middle of nowhere surrounded by ten foot barbed-wire fences and Danger-Radiation signs. You don't need to worry about this car anymore.”

“If it got out—” 

“It won't get out.” He hovered his hand over Robbie's shoulder, then patted him awkwardly. “I don't even think it wants to hurt anyone.”

Robbie stared at him, his eyes huge and his jaw tight and his expression heavy with something Amadeus couldn't read. “How could you know? You just said you can't understand its code. How could you possibly know?”

“I've got cameras out here, okay?” He jerked his head at the solar canopy. “Sometimes the feed cuts out, because the car's experimenting with jamming cell signals again, but there's plenty of onboard memory. I watch this car. You know there's a ton of wildlife on this base, right? Jackrabbits. Coyotes. And I see the car, with its back end facing them just like it's doing to us now. Just watching. I've seen a coyote _sleeping_ right under its tires, and this was the middle of the day when it normally moves around constantly. And it never moved until the coyote left and walked across its field of view. I've walked up to it—I'm the Hulk, simmer down—and it's never actually hit me. Sometimes it'll charge at me, usually it just runs away, but it never—I think it's done. If it wanted to kill stuff, this place would be full of roadkill. Something changed, probably before we ever caught it, and it stopped.”

“It stopped,” Robbie echoed.

“Yeah.”

Robbie had a weird and very intense face-journey. 

“So are you okay with not sending my car to Hell?” Amadeus demanded. “Because, if you haven't noticed, I've gotten slightly attached.”

“Yeah, it's fine,” Robbie croaked. 

Amadeus let out a hard breath. He'd thought they were on the same page, but it was a relief to be sure.

The car rolled toward them, slowly, twisting here and there to avoid sagebrush bushes. When it got about twenty feet away, it paused, then sped off over the rocky plain until it faded from view behind the scrub.

“So what do you think?” Amadeus asked.

“Huh?”

He waved at the valley and the recharging station. “This. You're the car guy. With the talking car. I did my best, but all I know about this guy is it doesn't like people. I bulldozed some bushes to make little roads, but it doesn't use those much. It circles the area, comes and gets charged once or twice a day, it's got a little routine, but it changes it up now and then. You think it's happy? I mean, public safety is my priority, but anything you can think of that a car might need, or want...” 

Robbie cleared his throat and spun around in a circle. Waved at Gabe over by the truck; Gabe waved back. When he faced Amadeus again he seemed to have composed himself. “Uh. Coolant.”

“Robot.”

“Oil.” 

“Full synthetic.”

“Air for the tires.”

“Foam core. Completely flat-proof, no maintenance.”

“Chassis lubrication.”

Amadeus winced. “Dammit. Knew I missed something.”

“You did all this,” Robbie said, waving at the concrete blocks, the solar canopy. “All this, for a car that killed people. Just so it can, what, live?”

He ducked his head. “It's a person. And it's not that much. I already had the land.”

“You're not bullshitting me right now,” Robbie said. “You did all this just 'cause. So it can be happy.”

“I did this because it's a _person_,” Amadeus argued, “and I'm not condemning a person to 'I have no mouth and I must scream.' This is just the bare minimum decent thing to do.”

“You really believe that.”

“I did my best!” Amadeus sighed. “Okay, no, not my _best,_ but I've got a lot of pans in the fire right now—” 

“You're really not getting anything out of this,” Robbie continued, and Amadeus realized he hadn't been accusing him of anything this time. He could be a little hard to read. “Just 'cause it's the right thing to do.”

“I'm no saint,” Amadeus said, “but, you know, I try to—I've got money and power, and when I can use it to do good, I'm kind of obligated. And this place—” He cleared his throat, paused, blinked hard. “I bought this place for a friend,” he explained carefully. “So he could have someplace to go and get away from people, where no one would hassle him. And then if they tried hunting him here, I could sue their asses because it's my property. But I, uh, I actually found another way to help him, and anyway, last year, he, um." Amadeus took a breath and rubbed his face. "So this place, it's unused, it's barely habitable. Might as well give it to the car.”

Robbie raised his hand gingerly, like he wanted to go for a hug or something. Amadeus offered him a handshake, and Robbie grabbed on hard. His fingers were rough and strong, and his grip hurt a little before he loosened it. “You're a good guy,” he said.

Amadeus shrugged. “I'm pretty awesome. But, uh. I'm trying, you know. Greatest good for the greatest number, from those to whom much is given, much will be required, etcetera etcetera. Speaking of. I set up a scholarship. You ever get to any kind of secondary school, you should apply for it. Limited to East Los Angeles residents, fifty thousand dollars per year, for single heads-of-household who are also caregivers of a sibling with disabilities. Called 'Heroes Like You Opportunity Grant.'”

Robbie slitted his eyes at him. 

“I could have limited it to Hispanic applicants with heterochromia whose first and last names start with the same letter, but—” 

“That's a lot of money. That's a _lot_ of money. Why—what do you—” 

Oh, no, not this  _what do you want from me _ shit again. “It's a tax write-off,” Amadeus interrupted. “Rich-guy thing. Don't make a big to-do about it.” 

“You know me and Gabe aren't unique, right?” Robbie demanded. “Somebody else is gonna get your grant. Especially since it'll take me years to save up for community college.”

Amadeus raised his eyebrows. He had, kind of, assumed Robbie and Gabe's situation was unusual. What if it wasn't? They made the best of it, but their lives kind of sucked. “If somebody else qualifies for the grant, I'll just be funding an education for another worthy individual.”

“And I'm not a hero,” Robbie insisted, turning back toward the food truck. Gabe was parked in front of a sagebrush bush, breaking off a piece of a branch. It was spring in the desert, and the sagebrush was starting to bloom. “Especially not for taking care of Gabe. He's my brother. I'd never do anything less.”

“Take the compliment,” Amadeus said. “Anyway, that's my Prius Ranch: do not attempt to feed or pet the feral Prius. Next stop, Racing Museum.”

_Racing Museum,_ he read on Robbie's lips. He had a spring in his step as they returned to the shadow of the food truck, where Gabe appeared to be building some kind of silo in the sand to hold his sagebrush leaves. “Why are you going to all this trouble?”

“I'm a good guy. Got an ID card and everything,” Amadeus said airily. “Plus. I've known you for maybe a month, but from what I've seen, you could use a fucking break.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Closing salutation clarification:  
Regards, Roberto Reyes _Get fucked. Roberto Reyes._
> 
> How to procrastinate for a major emotional scene: viewpoint change! Also, design and describe a flying car! How do repulsors work? I don't know!
> 
> More bullshit about physics and electromagnetic radiation, because car repair is interesting and easy to start to wrap my head around, while physics is math and very much out of my wheelhouse.
> 
> If you've read this far, thanks so much for coming along on this emotional journey about a misunderstood killer car and its unwitting creators. Now I am finally free to work on...literally anything but this story! Ah, freedom.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art Post for Totally Awesome Automotive Diagnostic Tool](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21438439) by [lalunaunita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalunaunita/pseuds/lalunaunita)


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